An interesting example of the 'Critical Period Hypothesis" is the case of Genie, also known as "The Wild Child." A thirteen years old victim of lifelong child abuse. Genie was discovered in 4th November in 1970 when her mother entered a social service office to apply for finaicial aid. The child drew attention because she was underized for her age and did not speak. In her case, we could question that a nurturing environment could somehow make up for a totla lack of language past the age 12. Genie was not able to acquire language completly although the degree to which she acquired language is disputed. I wonder why she did not acquire language perfectly. Is it because of the critical period or her retared birth? In this point, I would look over the DeKeyser's study(2000) about the critical period hypothesis.
DeKeyser replicated Johnson and Newport’s study in 1989. However, he did not conduct exactly the same way that Johnson and Newport did. He tried to accept the criticism about Johnson and Newport’s research. So, he supplemented the method. First, he picked up all participants who lived in US at least 10 years. Second, to avoid fatigue of participants, the test was shortened and the break time was given. Third, he tried to distinguish between the age of arrival and the age of test taking. More importantly, in study of DeKeyser, there was aptitude test to explain why there was the partial overlap of the native and nonnative distribution.
At first, looking at the method in Dekeyser, there were 57 native speakers of Hungarian. He had a reason why he picked up Hungarians for his study. Because Hungarian is a non-Indo-European language, he could eliminate variability due to the L1. For age of arrival, there are 42 participants who were older than 16 years old and 15 participants who younger than 16 years old. For this study, there were 3 instruments. First, to know language and educational background, age of arrival in North America and age of at the time of the test, all participants filled out the questionnaire. Second, there was the grammaticality judgment test based on the tape recording and correct-incorrect pair. Finally, the aptitude test was administered consisting of multiple-choice answers.
The goal of DeKeyser’s study is to assess the effect of verbal ability. In other words, he would like to find the effect of foreign language learning aptitude on ultimate attainment. In order to reveal more findings, studying the effects of age and verbal aptitude, and their interaction, should be better than studying them separately.
In this research, there were three hypotheses. First, the hypothesis of a strong negative correlation between age acquisition and score on the grammaticality judgment test was confirmed. Second, he predicted that no adult acquirers would score within the range of child acquirers unless they had high verbal aptitude. And this hypothesis was also supported. The third hypothesis that different structures showed different degrees of correlation with age of arrival was proved through this study.
Rendering the Dekeyser’s research, it provided an explanation for why certain learners and certain structures appear to be exceptions to the critical period effect. Through this study, we could find that adults with high verbal ability can reach near native speakers by using explicit learning mechanism and it proved evidence for Fundamental Difference Hypothesis. And regardless of verbal ability or age effect, certain structures can be learned explicitly by all learners. It also answered the question about the role of language-learning aptitude in naturalistic acquisition by showing that aptitude is a predictor of ultimate attainment in L2. The most important finding is that there really is a critical period for language acquisition. It is not just sensitive or optimal period for learning language. He suggested that the Critical Period Hypothesis only applies to implicit learning of abstract structures. That is, all findings of this study imply that explicit learning processes are a necessary condition for achieving a high level of competence in a nonnative language after childhood.
Reading this article, I wonder what is the best way to teach foreign language for adult learner. And also, I wonder whether it is worth or not to place a high value on early-childhood Englich Education.
댓글 없음:
댓글 쓰기