Sep 20, 2017

Who: Professor Niclas Abrahamsson

Deputy Director of the Centre for Research on Bilingualism; Stockholm University

What: Age effects on language acquisition, retention, and loss: Key hypotheses and findings

When : Wed. Sept. 20; 5:00 – 6:00 pm

Where:   University of Alberta - Education South, Room 277

One of the longest-standing scientific debates on language acquisition concerns the relationship between age of first exposure and language development, the big divide being between proponents and opponents of the idea of one or several critical period(s) for language. While being perhaps the most-observed language acquisition phenomenon among laypeople, ironically, children’s success in second language acquisition relative to that of adults is still, 50 years after the publication of Lenneberg’s (1967) Critical Period Hypothesis (CPH), a highly contested issue among scholars of linguistics, cognitive psychology, second language acquisition, and bilingualism. Considering the boldness of a biologically underpinned hypothesis on human language acquisition that assumes maturational changes to be the cause of child-adult differences, it should have come as no surprise to Lenneberg (nor anyone else) that the CPH was to become subject to falsification – and quite intensively so.

My aim with this talk is to recapitulate what may be seen as the key falsification criteria for the CPH and how my own research group’s empirical results have related to these. The research drawn upon encompasses a wide range of language learning circumstances that includes second and heritage language acquisition; early and late language exposure; simultaneous and sequential bilingualism, as compared to early and late/sequential monolingualism (in the case of international adoptees); near-native ultimate attainment; language learning aptitude; first language attrition; and first language residual activation (again, in the case of international adoptees). These issues were investigated using comprehensive research designs comprising a strict selection of participants and native controls, a large battery of elicitation techniques with demanding language tasks covering aspects of phonology, grammar, and lexical idiomaticity in both production and perception, as well as an aptitude component. The findings privilege an interpretation of age-of-acquisition effects in terms of maturational constraints rather than primarily as an effect of cross-linguistic or sociopsychological circumstances. I conclude the talk with implications for further research directions, specifically with respect to potential bilingualism effects and a dual system approach.

Everyone Welcome

ATESL Chapter: Edmonton