A critical period for second language acquisition: Evidence from 2/3 million English speakers
Name
nihms964317.pdf
Description
Accepted version
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1.51 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
7b2ca4890ddfd56ed7897e01a9c557e0
Author(s)
Hartshorne, Joshua
Tenenbaum, Joshua B
Date Issued
August 2018
Journal
Cognition
Publisher
Elsevier BV
Citation
Hartshorne, Joshua K., Joshua B. Tenenbauma and Steven Pinker. “A critical period for second language acquisition: Evidence from 2/3 million English speakers.” Cognition, vol. 177, 2018, pp. 263-277 © 2018 The Author(s)
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
Children learn language more easily than adults, though when and why this ability declines have been obscure for both empirical reasons (underpowered studies) and conceptual reasons (measuring the ultimate attainment of learners who started at different ages cannot by itself reveal changes in underlying learning ability). We address both limitations with a dataset of unprecedented size (669,498 native and non-native English speakers) and a computational model that estimates the trajectory of underlying learning ability by disentangling current age, age at first exposure, and years of experience. This allows us to provide the first direct estimate of how grammar-learning ability changes with age, finding that it is preserved almost to the crux of adulthood (17.4 years old) and then declines steadily. This finding held not only for “difficult” syntactic phenomena but also for “easy” syntactic phenomena that are normally mastered early in acquisition. The results support the existence of a sharply-defined critical period for language acquisition, but the age of offset is much later than previously speculated. The size of the dataset also provides novel insight into several other outstanding questions in language acquisition.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
10.1016/J.COGNITION.2018.04.007
