Critical Language Acquisition Essay

A critical period is defined as a period during an organism’s development in which a particular skill or characteristic is believed to be most readily acquired. Linguistic communication is a unique feature of human beings. Early in life, the human brain is malleable for organizing itself in response to language input. As age progresses, the human brain is not as flexible in learning language. Eric Lenneberg, who was a linguist and neurologist, was the first to propose a critical period for language acquisition in 1967. He noticed that children were more likely than adults to recover language function and proposed that there was a critical period for exposure to language that lasted from birth to puberty (Finn, 2013). Since Lenneberg,

Studies show that through functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans, different areas of the brain, specifically the Broca’s area, are activated when hearing an individual’s native language and their second language. In contrast, bilingual individuals who have learned their second language at an early age have shown activation in the same part of the brain, regardless of whether the native language or the second language is being heard. It is well established in adult studies that language is supported by a typically left lateralized, frontal-temporal functional network. Children activate the same frontal-temporal network, however, developmental differences include a less lateralized pattern and more activation of areas beyond the basic network (Berl et al., 2012). This is evidence that early in life the language center of the brain is quite flexible at attuning itself into various kinds of linguistic input. After the critical period starts to come to a close, the Broca’s area is no longer capable of being restructured to accommodate new languages (Heine,

Cases involving “feral” and deprived children who have received language stimulation after the onset of puberty support the hypothesis of language being innate and only acquired during the critical period. In the case known as “Wild Boy of Averyron,” a boy given the name Victor was found roaming the woods of Averyon in Southern France about a century ago. Victor could not speak and behaved like a wild animal, indicating that he had been raised by wild animals, by eating off the floor, making canine noises, and disliking baths. A doctor by the name of Jean Marc Itard, who had developed a reputation for teaching the deaf how to speak, took Victor in. After many years of hard work, Itard failed to teach Victor no more than a few lexemes. Another case occurred in 1961 when a 13-year-old girl by the name of Genie, who had been isolated in a baby crib for most of her life and never spoken to, was discovered. Many psychologists spent years trying to teach Genie to speak, however, her speech did not advance beyond the grammatical competence of a