Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of tables
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- List of abbreviations
- 1 Just in time: is there a critical period for language acquisition?
- 2 Right on time: process and schedule of first language acquisition
- 3 All in good time: a window of opportunity for first language acquisition
- 4 Behind time: process and schedule of second language acquisition
- 5 Pressed for time: age constraints in second language acquisition
- 6 Biding time: further consideration of age and acquisition
- 7 It's about time: evaluation of age sensitivity in language acquisition
- Bibliography
- Index
6 - Biding time: further consideration of age and acquisition
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of tables
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- List of abbreviations
- 1 Just in time: is there a critical period for language acquisition?
- 2 Right on time: process and schedule of first language acquisition
- 3 All in good time: a window of opportunity for first language acquisition
- 4 Behind time: process and schedule of second language acquisition
- 5 Pressed for time: age constraints in second language acquisition
- 6 Biding time: further consideration of age and acquisition
- 7 It's about time: evaluation of age sensitivity in language acquisition
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Introduction
In Mary Shelley's eponymous novel, Victor Frankenstein, the young scientist who creates a “miserable monster,” is frightened in the fourth chapter by the latter's nocturnal visit and his muttered “inarticulate sounds.” The reader is led to believe that the monster is unable to speak, an adult faced with the task of first language learning. Evidence from adult learners of L1 such as Chelsea assure us that gaining fluency in a first language is not guaranteed in adulthood. Yet three chapters and just a few months later, the “wretch” is quite fluent in articulating his ideas: “All men hate the wretched; how, then, must I be hated, who am miserable beyond all living things! Yet you, my creator, detest and spurn me, thy creature, to whom thou are bound by ties only indissoluble by the annihilation of one of us. You purpose to kill me. How dare you sport thus with life?” (Shelley 1989 [1818], 58). The monster's prose is quite remarkable for its sophistication – embedded clauses, conditional sentences, careful pronominal agreement, and subtle vocabulary – not to speak of its reasoning. Since late L1A results in defective grammar, the wretch's fluency is implausible unless his mentor merely reanimated the original brain with its language intact. It is impossible that he picked up these sophisticated language skills after reanimation with an infant-like brain, for neurolinguistic studies reveal that the complexity of language knowledge can only develop over several years, mainly during childhood (Kuhl 2004).
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- Information
- Language Development and Age , pp. 172 - 210Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2007