2
Age
Children acquiring their first language complete the feat within a biological window of
four to six years of age. By contrast, the ages at which different L2 learners may begin
learning the new language range wildly. Thus, age emerges as a remarkable site of
difference between L2 and L1 acquisition. Perhaps for this reason, understanding the
relationship between age and L2 acquisition has been a central goal since the inception
of the field of SLA. Two issues are hotly debated. One pertains to the possibility that a
biological schedule may operate, after which the processes and outcomes of L2
acquisition are fundamentally and irreversibly changed. This is also known as the
Critical Period Hypothesis in L2 learning. The other issue relates to the possibility that
there may be a ceiling to L2 learning, in the sense that it may be impossible to develop
levels of L2 competence that are isomorphic to the competence all humans possess in
their own mother tongue. Although the topic of age has been investigated profusely in
SLA, clear or simple answers to vital questions about the relationship between age and
L2 learning have not been easy to produce. As you will see in this chapter, the accrued
findings remain difficult to reconcile and interpret, and many questions to understand
universal age effects on L2 acquisition remain open.
2.1 CRITICAL AND SENSITIVE PERIODS FOR THE ACQUISITION OF HUMAN
LANGUAGE
The idea that there may be an optimal, maybe even critical, age period for the
acquisition of language entered SLA research through the work in neurolinguistics
of Penfield and Roberts (1959) and Lenneberg (1967). Their ideas quickly became
influential in a time when the new field called SLA was emerging. These authors
contributed neurolinguistic data supporting a natural predisposition in the child’s
brain for learning the first language, together with anecdotal observations that
children were also adept foreign language learners, when compared to adults. The
possible causes tentatively identified at the time were the loss of plasticity
undergone by human brains by year nine of life (Penfield and Roberts, 1959) or
perhaps the completion by the onset of puberty of the process of lateralization, the
specialization in all right-handed individuals of the left brain hemisphere for
language functions (Lenneberg, 1967). The hypothesis of a critical period for L1
acquisition, and as a corollary for L2 acquisition, seemed natural in the late 1960s
and continues to be considered plausible today.
Critical and sensitive periods for the acquisition of human language 13
Indeed, critical periods have been established for several phenomena in animal
behaviour and in the development of certain human faculties, such as vision. The
hypothesis is that there is a specific period of time early in life when the brain
exhibits a special propensity to attend to certain experiences in the environment
(for example, language) and learn from them. That is, the brain is pre-programmed
to be shaped by that experience in dramatic ways, but only if it occurs within a
biologically specified time period. To be more precise, two different kinds of age-
related periods for learning are typically distinguished: critical and sensitive.
Knudsen (2004) offers useful illustrations of both cases from outside the SLA field,
which are summarized in Table 2.1. In much of the SLA literature, nevertheless, the
terms ‘critical period’ and ‘sensitive period’ are discussed as essentially
synonymous. This is probably because the available evidence with regard to the
acquisition of an additional language is still too preliminary for SLA researchers to
be in a position to make finer distinctions between the two notions (see also
discussion by Harley and Wang, 1997).
Table 2.1
Critical and sensitive periods in animal learning, based on Knudsen (2004)
An example of a critical period is ocular representation in the cortex of kittens. This neurological process
develops according to a narrow window of opportunity between 30 and 80 days of life. If kittens are deprived
from the experience of viewing during this time window (because one eye is forced to remain closed), they
will lose vision, simply because the closed eye and the brain failed to connect, as it were. That is, even
Text
though the now uncovered eye is optically normal, it fails to convey the visual information to the axons in the
thalamus, which in turn cannot convey it to the neurons in cortical level IV. Another well-known example of a
critical, irreversible period is filial imprinting in the forebrain of ducks, which makes them follow the first
large moving entity between 9 and 17 hours of hatching and bond with it as the recognized parent. An
example of a sensitive period, on the other hand, is barn owls’ ability to process spatial information
auditorily (indispensable for catching mice in the dark!). Young owls develop the ability to create mental
maps of their space based on auditory cues at a young age. If either hearing or vision is impaired during this
sensitive period, auditory spatial information will not be processed normally later in life. However, problems
can be compensated for and reversed, even well past the sensitive period, if the visual or auditory
impairment is restored and rich exposure to sound input is provided
The evidence for a critical or sensitive period for first language acquisition in
humans is strong, although it remains far less well understood than the critical
period for the development of, for example, ocular representation in our cortex.
Some of the evidence comes from research involving sadly famous cases of children
who, due to tragic circumstances, were deprived from regular participation in
language use and social interaction until about the age of puberty. This was the case
of Genie (recounted from different perspectives by Curtiss, 1977; Rymer, 1993) and
of several feral children (discussed in Candland, 1993). Under such seriously
detrimental circumstances, these adolescents could not learn the mother tongue to
the level of their peers, even after they were rescued and efforts were made to ‘teach’
them language.
14 Age
Additional evidence comes from studies of so-called postponed first language
acquisition in the deaf population. This case, although unfortunate, accounts for
about 90 per cent of deaf babies who are born to hearing parents with knowledge of
only an oral language. In essence, these babies grow up without experiencing
regular exposure to either spoken or sign input for the first six years of life and,
therefore, they learn no first language until they are sent to school, precisely at
around that age. The findings contributed over the years by Canada-based
researcher Rachel Mayberry (2007; Mayberry and Lock, 2003) suggest that these
children will usually exhibit incomplete acquisition of their late-learned first
language. A study in the United States by otolaryngologists Mario Svirsky and
Rachael Holt (2005) augments this evidence. These researchers tracked the
vocabulary, grammar and speech perception abilities of 96 deaf babies who had
received cochlear implants at ages one through four. These babies’ spoken language
began developing once awareness of sound was made possible through the
implants. However, babies who received the implant after the age of 2 exhibited
slower progress and overall lower performance in vocabulary and grammar (but
not in speech perception skills), compared to babies who had their hearing restored
before the end of the second year of life. The researchers interpreted the evidence
cautiously but suggestively as indication that a sensitive period for L1 acquisition
exists, and one that is much shorter than once thought (see also Svirsky et al.,
2007). In light of the new cochlear implant evidence, we can speculate that it may
end after the first two years of life, at least for some aspects of acquisition.
For L2 acquisition, as well, it seems plausible to posit that there are sensitive
periods for a number of language areas. But what does the record of SLA research
tell us?
2.2 JULIE, AN EXCEPTIONALLY SUCCESSFUL LATE L2 LEARNER OF
ARABIC
Striking SLA evidence bearing on the sensitive period hypothesis for L2 acquisition
comes from a study conducted by Georgette Ioup and her colleagues (Ioup et al.,
1994). These researchers investigated the limits of ultimate attainment achieved by
Julie, an exceptionally successful L2 user. The study is unique, as you will
appreciate, because Ioup et al. employed a rich case study methodology that yielded
in-depth knowledge of Julie’s L2 learning history as well as a wealth of data probing
several areas of her L2 competence.
Julie was an L1 speaker of British English who had moved to Egypt at the age of
21 due to marriage to an Egyptian. She settled in Cairo with her husband, became a
teacher of English as a foreign language (EFL) and had two children. Julie had never
received formal instruction in the L2 and could not read or write in Arabic. Yet, she
was able to learn Egyptian Arabic entirely naturalistically and regularly passed
herself off as a native speaker. In fact, her family and friends remembered she was
able to do so just after two and a half years of residence in the country. According
to Julie, Arabic became the dominant language at home after the third year of
Julie, an exceptionally successful late L2 learner of Arabic 15
residence in Cairo (although she also reports her children grew up to be competent
bilinguals). Julie had been living in Egypt for 26 years at the time of the research.
In order to test whether her accent was truly indistinguishable from that of a
native speaker, the researchers mixed Julie’s recorded explanation of her favourite
recipe with recordings of the same oral task by another six native and advanced
non-native speakers of Arabic. Seven of 13 judges rated Julie as definitely native,
whereas the other six rated her as non-native, and commented that a few small
differences in vowel and consonant quality and in intonation had given her away.
In another task testing her speech perception abilities, Julie proved herself able to
pick out Egyptian from non-Egyptian accents among seven different varieties of
Arabic with 100 per cent accuracy. She was a little bit less adept at discriminating a
Cairo-sounding Egyptian accent from two other Egyptian regional accents, but so
were six of the 11 native-speaking judges.
In order to probe her tacit knowledge of the Arabic language, Julie, 11 L1 Arabic
control participants and another very advanced non-native speaker of Arabic were
asked to do three other tasks that tested morphosyntactic phenomena. The first
task was translating 12 sentences from English into Arabic. Here, once again, Julie
made very few mistakes. For example, she translated ‘went to the club’ as raahit
linnaadi, without dropping the preposition l- (Ioup et al. explain that this is
necessary in Arabic to indicate the meaning is not just ‘to’ but ‘into’; p. 82). The
second task involved judging the grammaticality of selected Arabic sentences.
Julie’s judgements diverged from those of the majority of native speakers on only
five out of 37 sentences. Apparently, she preferred the unmarked word order choice
for questions and rejected variable word order alternatives that are also
grammatical in Arabic. In the third task, Julie and the others had to answer the
question ‘who did X’ in response to 18 recorded sentences containing cases of
anaphora, a syntactic phenomenon so subtle that it is unlikely to be learned
through explanations or through conscious analysis of the input. Anaphora refers
to the binding of a pronoun to the right preceding noun in a sentence. For example,
who does she refer to in the following sentence (p. 89)?
(1) ‘Nadia saw Mona when she entered the room’
a. Nadya shaafit mona heyya daxalit il-ooda
b. Nadya shaafit mona lamma daxalit il-ooda
Who entered the room – Mona or Nadia? The preferred answer would be ‘Nadia’
for the English sentence. In Arabic, if the pronoun heyya is used, as in (1a), the
preferred interpretation is that ‘she’ refers to Nadia, the more distant referent.
Conversely, if heyya is omitted, as in (1b), the preferred interpretation for ‘she’
will be Mona, the closest referent outside the embedded clause ‘when she
entered the room’. Julie was able to correctly interpret the anaphora pronouns in
two-thirds of the 18 items. She performed less well on the remaining six items,
which involved relative clauses such as ‘Ahmad bought the dress for the girl that
you went to the lady that she angered’ ([Link] ishtara il-fustaan li-l-bint illi inta
ruh.t li-s-sit illi heyya’za alit-ha, p. 90). Not only Julie, but the 11 native speakers
16 Age
too, found it difficult to answer the question ‘who angered whom’ after they
heard this sentence! However, only Julie went on to answer in a way that would
mean she interpreted the overt pronoun heyya to refer to the closest referent in
the sentence.
In their study, Ioup et al. also included another exceptionally successful late adult
learner, Laura, who like Julie was married to an Egyptian and typically passed off as
a native speaker. Unlike Julie, however, she held a Master’s degree in modern
standard Arabic from a US university and was a teacher of standard Arabic at a
university in Cairo at the time of the study. Laura performed by and large as well as
Julie in all tasks except for the speech perception one. In other words, she was also
exceptionally successful. However, Ioup et al. concentrate on Julie and leave Laura
in the background of their report, perhaps because Laura was an instructed learner
and hence many more factors come into consideration. Julie, by being a purely
naturalistic late learner, provides a strong test case for the Critical Period
Hypothesis. Or rather, some would say, against it! In the end, it is difficult to
evaluate what the small degree of variability in Julie’s L2 outstanding performance
means, particularly given that there was definitely some variability for native
speaker responses across all measures too. Interestingly, Ioup (2005) herself
believes the preponderance of evidence supports the existence of age-related
sensitive periods for L2 learning.
2.3 ARE CHILDREN OR ADULTS BETTER L2 LEARNERS? QUESTIONS OF
RATE
We all tend to think that children pick up languages speedily and effortlessly. Like
many apparently undeniable truths (e.g. the earth does look very flat to our plain
eyes, after all!), this assertion was questioned once it was submitted to systematic
investigation. When in the 1970s several SLA researchers compared children and
adults’ L2 learning rate in second language environments, the findings
unexpectedly were suggestive of an advantage for adults over children. For
example, in two oft-cited studies conducted in the Netherlands, Catherine Snow
and Marian Hoefnagel-Höhle (1977, 1978) found that adults and adolescents were
better than children in terms of what they could learn in a 25-minute instruction
session or up to a year of naturalistic exposure to L2 Dutch. Although the advantage
of the older learners began diminishing after ten months or so, the findings were
surprising because they flatly contradicted assumed critical period effects.
In a seminal article, Stephen Krashen, Michael Long and Robin Scarcella (1979)
put a grain of salt on these findings. They concluded that older is better initially, but
that younger is better in the long run. They based this conclusion on a review of 23
studies of L2 learning in second language contexts published between 1962 and
1979, comprising the available findings at the time. The 18 studies that involved
short-term comparisons (with lengths of L2 exposure in a second language
environment between 25 minutes and one year, rarely up to three years) suggested
that adult learners and older children learned at a faster pace than younger
Age and L2 morphosyntax: questions of ultimate attainment 17
children. This may have been in part an artefact of instruction or tests that
demanded cognitive maturity and involved metalinguistic skills, because adults
may be able to use cognitive and metacognitive abilities and strategies to learn
many aspects of the L2 initially faster. Findings were available also from five long-
term studies, however, of which the most widely cited to date were dissertations
conducted at Harvard University and New York University, respectively, by Susan
Oyama (1976) and Mark Patkowski (1980). The five long-term studies revealed that
when accomplishments in the L2 were compared after at least five years of
residence in the L2 environment (often after ten or 20 years, and for some
participants up to 61 years), then young starters were clearly better than adult
starters. Long (1990) reassessed the evidence on rate and ultimate attainment a
decade later and reiterated the same conclusions, arguing that the rate advantage
for adults dissipates after a little more than a year, because children eventually
always catch up and surpass late starters. More recent findings from a study by
Aoyama et al. (2008) also lend support to the same conclusion.
Age findings gleaned in foreign language contexts in the last few years, however,
have complicated this picture (see studies in García Mayo and García Lecumberri,
2003; Muñoz, 2006). Particularly in the context of English learned in Cataluña
(Muñoz, 2006), when early starters studying English from the age of eight to 16
were compared to late starters studying English from the age of 11 to 17, the late
starters actually maintained an advantage that persisted well after five years of
instruction (seven and nine years, respectively). That is, younger starters do not
appear to catch up in these foreign learning contexts, where the L2 is only available
through instruction. This is actually not surprising if we remember that the same
time length of five years entails an intensity and quality of exposure to the L2 that
can be radically different in foreign versus second language learning contexts. At
three hours a week by nine months of school a year, students enrolled in a foreign
language in school may experience as little as 540 hours of actual instruction and L2
exposure over five years. By contrast, in the same chronological time window,
learners in L2 environments may accrue about 7,000 hours of L2 exposure (if we
calculate a conservative four hours a day). (A sobering comparison is that children
learning their L1 may receive of the order of 14,000 hours of exposure, also based
on a conservative estimate of eight hours a day!) Thus, as Singleton (2003) suggests,
in foreign language contexts considerably more than five years would be needed to
capture any lasting differences between differing starting ages. Age may exert
universal influences on the learning of a second language, but context moderates
these universal effects and needs to be considered carefully.
2.4 AGE AND L2 MORPHOSYNTAX: QUESTIONS OF ULTIMATE
ATTAINMENT
Contemporary SLA researchers interested in the question of critical or sensitive
Text
periods now consider it essential to take a long-term view on ultimate attainment
and to evaluate the end state of L2 acquisition (Long, 1990; Hylstenstam and
