User:Kindamysteriousalittlebithispter/sandbox

I would like to add to the Critical Period wikipedia page under the heading of Second Language Acquisition. There are several articles that I know of that could enhance the information presented on the page. Here are my proposed sources: Critical period effects in second language learning: The influence of maturational state on the acquisition of English as a second language, Brain imaging of language plasticity in adopted adults: Can a second language replace the first? How native is near-native? The issue of ultimate attainment in adult second language acquisition, and Second language acquisition and the critical period hypothesis.

Draft:

Over the years, many experimenters have tried to find evidence in support or against the critical periods for second language acquisition. Many have found evidence that young children acquire language more easily than adults, but there are also special cases of adults acquiring a second language with native-like proficiency. Thus it has been difficult for researchers to separate correlation from causation.

In 1989, Jacqueline S. Johnson and Elissa L. Newport found support for the claim that second languages are more easily acquired before puberty, or more specifically before the age of seven. They tested second language learners of English who arrived in the United States at various ages ranging from three to thirty-nine, and they found that there was a decline in grammatical correctness after the age of seven. Johnson and Newport attributed this claim to a decline in language learning ability with age. Opponents of the critical period argue that the difference in language ability found by Johnson and Newport could be due to the different types of input that children and adults receive; children received reduced input while adults receive more complicated structures.

Additional evidence against a strict critical period is also found in the work of Pallier et al (2003) who found that children adopted to France from Korea were able to become native-like in their performance of French even after the critical period for phonology. Their experiment may represent a special case where subjects must lose their first language in order to more perfectly acquire their second.

There is also some debate as to how one can judge the native-like quality of the speech participants produce and what exactly it means to be a near-native speaker of a second language. White et al found that it is possible for non-native speakers of a language to become native-like in some aspects, but those aspects are influenced by their first language.