First Language Acquisition In Adolescence

First Language Acquisition in Adolescence Evidence for a Critical Period for verbal Language Development By: Gina M. Grimshaw, Ana Adelstein, M. Philip Bryden and G. E. MacKinnon Reviewed by Azira Syahirah, Universiti Industri Selangor

First-language acquisition in adolesence: Evidence for a Critical Period for verbal language Development about two true stories. It is about Genie and E. M’ s case, both of them are learning language during adulthood, not during their childhood. This case told about how both of the person learning their language and why they are learning late at adulthood, not during when they are children. Children are successfully better learning language more than adults. This theory is proposed by Lenneberg. He proposed a mechanism for the critical period based on an initial state of equip potential followed by the gradual establishment of left-hemisphere language specialization. This is called as childhood aphasia. Second-language acquisition is one of the evidence in support of the critical period. According to Johnson & Newport, 1989, 1991, although adults demonstrate and initial advantage over children, long-term mastery of the second language decrease with increasing age of acquisition. This relationship exist both for language-specific and universal syntactic structures. Another evidence to support the critical period are extreme deprivation. The only welldocumented case of Genie, a young girl who was kept locked in her room and had no contact with any human between the ages of the 20 months and 13 years. She will beat if she make any vocalization sound. She learned language after received intensive educational and the therapeutic intervention. She had particular difficult with verb tense, word other, preposition, and pronouns. She had difficulty to learn language because of her tragic background during her childhood. Genie’ s case is a weak version.

Deaf children of hearing parents is one of the evidence in support of the critical period. These children have great difficulty learning spoken language and they just will learn sign language after they enter residential school for the deaf. This finding seems to support a weak form of the critical period hypothesis, that children are better language learners than adult, but does not support to claim that language must be learned in childhood. The case report about E.M., he is deaf since birth. He came to Canada when he was 19 years old. He was fitted with binaural hearing aids that corrected his hearing loss to35 dB, a level that allows him to hear spoken conversation. E.M. spend 6 months his family and 6 months with his relative in Canada who do not know this homesign language. E.M has great difficulty with articulation and seldom speak spontaneously. After 48 months, E.M still relying heavily on gesture for communication. The similarities between Genie and E.M are striking , given the great differences in their history. E.M did not experiences the severe abuse and deprivation that Genie did, he have the benefit of intensive educational remediation when he started to learn language. Genie and E.M were exposed to different languages in different context and yet both seem to suffer from similar linguistic impairment when he started to learn language. They are two possible hypothesis about why the critical period may more seriously constrain the development of verbal as opposed to manual languages. E.M hearing aids do not fully correct his hearing loss, and he therefore experiences impoverished auditory input. A second possibility is that homesign provide a better foundation for the acquisition of manual as opposed to verbal language. Certainly signers do not face the same physical challengers to language perception and production that E.M does.But further, they are parallels between the syntactic structures of homesign and ASL that made allow the acquisition of ASL to more closely resemble late acquisition of a second as opposed to of first language.

As the conclusion, the cases here of linguistic isolation in the context of cognitive and emotional development. E.M’s case is consistent with the hypothesis that there is a critical period for first-language acquisition that ends at puberty, if not before. Unfortunately that came address the nature of the critical period. Although critical period hypothesis have usually been associated with ideas of biological determinism, this need not be the case. We have provided the observation that first-language acquisition in puberty is atypical many ways. These may reflect a loss of neural plasticity. Or the development of cognitive processes that inhabit language acquisition, or some interaction between the two. It is likely that language acquisition involves a set of innate constraints that dictate the processing of linguistic input as is it provided by the environment. These constraint normally at early in childhood producing oredictable patterns of language development. However, as the individuals develop, neural and cognitive structures change, both throw maturation and environmental stimulation resulting in associated changes in the constraints on language ecquisition.