What Would Be a Good Age to Start Second Language Acquisition

What would be a good age to start second language acquisition?

041071 Sayaka Hozu

Do younger children learn faster than adult?

・At the first stages of second language acquisition, people in puberty and young adult learn all language parts (syntax, morphemes, pronunciation, and vocabulary) faster than younger children.

⇒Older is faster, but younger is better

・When contacting the language continually, younger children will become native-speakers like in all aspects of language more than people who start learning the L2 in puberty and adults.

・The receptive ability for language learning is not lost suddenly, but diminishes gradually as time passes.

Explanation for age-related differences

There are age-related differences in Second Language Acquisition. There are at least four explanations: the Social-psychological explanation, the Cognitive explanation ＜認識の説＞, the Input explanation and the Neurological explanation ＜神経に関する説明＞.

Social-psychological explanation ＜社会心理学的な説明＞

・There are some differences in learning language between adults and children.

・Adults have more firmly established first language.

・Adults learners like to speak accented second language speech as a speaker of a first language.

Adults have acquired first language before learning second language. First language accent influences with second language accent. For example, and⇒アン｢ド｣

・Learners might have negative attitude while learning second language, but the behavior prevents their learning.

・Children may be not influenced by the detrimental effects (有害な影響) of such attitudes.

Cognitive explanation ＜認識の説明＞

・There are different processes for child SLA and adult SLA.

・Children use a LAD (language acquisition device) as in first language acquisition.

ＬＡＤ：The Language Acquisition Device is a postulated "organ" of the brain that is supposed to function as a congenital device for learning symbolic language (ie. language acquisition). First proposed by Noam Chomsky, the LAD concept is a component of the nativist theory of language which dominates contemporary formal linguistics, which asserts that humans are born with the instinct or "innate facility" for acquiring language.

・Adults take a lot of time to solve problems about abstract things.

Input explanation

・Children receive better and larger input than adults.

・Children learn language by playing with native-speakers.

・Children enjoy the opportunities to speak with native-speakers

・Thorough these opportunities, they are getting phonological practice.

Neurological explanation ＜神経に関する説明＞

・The brain becomes specialized for different functions around puberty.

The process is called lateralization. Before the puberty, a critical period exists during which the brain is more plastic and allows the transfer of a function from one hemisphere to the other.

・SLA abilities decline with loss of neurological flexibility.

Critical Period Hypothesis

The critical Period Hypothesis suggests that the human brain is most receptive to language. It is said that this period lasts from birth to puberty (思春期). After puberty, language learning becomes more difficult. The Critical Period Hypothesis attributes this difficulty to a drastic change in the way that the brain processes language after puberty. This makes reaching fluency during adulthood much difficult that it is in childhood.

There are some theories about the Critical Period Hypothesis

Penfield (1966)

・suggested the Critical Period about foreign language learning first.

・should start to learning second language from four years old to eight years old because during the period, imitation skill (模倣力)is so vigorous (旺盛な).

・After ten years old, the language center in the brain will be aging.

Lenneberg (1967)

・learning language starts from two years old and end about twelve years old as the brain developed.

・After the period, it will be difficult to be native-speaker like.

Conclusion

Young people learn language better than adults. But, only people who started to learn language at the early in life can be native- speakers. However, for Japanese learners the optimal timing is not the earliest possible, but may be around age nine, although being this specific is probably a little premature. Starting at that time should be more efficient and yet allow the child tome to establish a firm basis in her first language. In order to acquire foreign language effectively, it is necessary to establish first language firmly during the early child hood.