THE CRITICAL PERIOD

What is the critical period in language? It is a hypothesis that states that we have a specific time to acquire language and that in order to acquire it we must be exposed to language during our first years of life until middle childhood.   Do you know what happens in our brain during this period? In our brain we have a capacity to adapt to different situations such as the acquisition of language and this is what we call plasticity, so the acquisition of language is easy and fast while we are young but with growth decreases.

Noam Chomsky thinks about this... Chomsky (1965) claimed that human beings must have acquired internal mechanism, which he called the Language Acquisition Device (LAD), responsible for "perceiving" language. Infants find themselves in an environment with little language (because parents greatly reduce their language production) and yet they develop language quite automatically until they become fluent in learning the learned language.

What happens if children are not exposed to language? When children are isolated from human contact and therefore from language, they begin to have failures in certain functions of their brain. There are cases of children who were raised in extreme isolation and on these occasions, they are called "wild children" because they tend to act like one, even some were supposedly raised by animals, for example, Victor Aveyron who was abandoned in a forest or the girls Amala and Kamala who were supposedly raised by wolves.

Geni Case studies examples  Genie (1970):  she was subjected to horrific abuse and isolation. This case was of great help to researchers studying whether language can be taught after the critical period of language development.     Isabelle (1930):  Isabelle was discovered when she was 7 years old, living in a dark room with her deaf-mute mother as her only contact. She had no sense of language until she began to speak after intense training.     The czech twins (1972):  The Czechoslovakian twins were discovered at the age of 7. They were locked in a basement with their only company and were also mistreated and beaten. They barely spoke and conversed by gestures. But they were adopted by two sisters who gave them a loving home.  By the age of 14, they had caught up. Video:

Who are also affected? On the other hand, children who are deaf from birth or who become deaf are also affected in language acquisition because they cannot hear the language around them during the critical period, so the only way to learn it is through sign language. However, most parents of deaf children do not know sign language, which results in deaf children being exposed late to language (Fromkin, Rodman & Hyams, 2018). In summary... By not acquiring language, they were not able to speak or know a language, this linguistic inability demonstrates that language acquisition is an innate skill that is based on the neurological one. So, they don't have full brain development for language.   The critical period is valid for the acquisition of grammatical skills for the native language. However, it is not for all aspects of language because language is a complex system that is divided into various cognitive systems (Fromkin et al., 2018)

  References: Fromkin, V. F., Rodman, R. R. & Hyams, N. H. (2018 ).  An Introduction to Language  (11th edition) [PDF].  Cengage Learning. Hedlund, A. (2021, 12 march).  A critical period for language acquisition: let’s get critical . EDCrocks.  https://edcrocks.com/2018/12/02/a-critical-period-for-language-acquisition-lets-get-critical/