Author(s): Catherine Rice
E-mail: C.M.Rice@strath.ac.uk
The Critical Period hypothesis and its successors have been widely tested in relation to Second Language Acquisition. This paper presents a brief review of some of the research findings, and concludes that the jury is still out on the extent to which age correlates inversely with ultimate attainment in a second language. It suggests that there is too much evidence of high achievement amongst adults to attribute decline in proficiency to age, and proposes instead a selective age effect which may leave syntactic knowledge more intact than other language levels.
Paper: Postscript (334940 bytes)