Dolly Ramos G

The crticial period hypothesis in essence contends that the ability to learn a language is limited to the years before puberty after which, as a result of neurological changes in the brain the ability is lost.

 Feral Children

unless exposed to lg in the early years of life, humans lose much of their innate ability to learn a language

Compelling evidence of feral, confine and isolated children

FC don't provide the best evidence partly because of sub normality

Victor= suffered emotional and physical trauma. Genie = affect her learning capacity

Language acquisition after return to civilization“all is not lost”

A Theory of Neurolinguistic Development John L Locke 1993

language develops in four phases

Bello, sometimes referred to as the Nigerian Chimp Boy

http://www.toptenz.net/top-10-feral-children.php#ixzz2RC3YvnDJ

Found in 1996. No one is exactly sure of his age.

Found in the Nigerian forest and is both physically and mentally disabled.

Possibly the explanation for his abandonment (practice within the Fulani tribe).

Raised by chimpanzees behaviors & walking like them and displaying many of their animalistic behaviors.

One of the more recent cases cases 2008 Vanya Yudin ‘the Russian Bird Boy’ 7 years

His mother never spoke to him and she simply treated him like her pets.

When his mother attempted to talk to the boy, he didn’t speak, just chirped.

Never abused physically, but still lacked of human interaction.

http://www.toptenz.net/top-10-feral-children.php#ixzz2RC5BJWZ5

Camparising

Children Adult Learn Lg without

confusing

Brain plasticity

Fluency

Acquire accent

Develop good listening

Memory limitation Not fluent enough Accent & pronunc

affected Full control of

syntax & morphology Vacabulary acq is

limited

In the classroomA problem arising from the differences between

younger learners and adults is that adults believe that they cannot learn languages well.

Teachers can help learners With this belief, for ex, by talking about the learning process and styles, helping set realistic goals, choosing suitable methodologies, and addressing the emotional needs of the adult

learner.

 co-ordinated bilingualismChildren develop two parallel linguistic systems, so

that for any one word. when the two parents have different mother

tongues and each parent speaks only his or her own mother tongue to the child.

the child constructs two separate linguistic systems and can handle each of them easily.

Another situation is when relatively young children who have already mastered their mother tongue are adopted by parents who speak a different language.

Once again, the distinction between the two languages is crystal-clear for the child.

compound bilingualismChildren have only one signified for two signifiers

and so cannot detect the conceptual differences between the two languages.

Compound bilingualism is what occurs when both parents are bilingual and both parents speak to the child in both languages indiscriminately.

The child will grow up to speak both languages effortlessly and without an accent, but will never master all the subtleties of either of them. In other words, the child will not really have a mother tongue.

Late bilingualism Late bilingualism is developed after the

critical period for language learning. In such cases, it is thought that when people

acquire their second language through immersion in a community that speaks it

Implicit memory plays more of a role, whereas when they do so solely through formal classroom studies, explicit memory is more involved.

ReferencesMore feral children

http://www.toptenz.net/top-10-feral-children.php

David’s Enlgish Teaching World. The communicty for taeachers fo English