LING 1010 Lecture Notes - Lecture 21: Lexifier, Eric Lenneberg

• School: UConn
• Department: Linguistics
• Course: LING 1010
• Professor: Akihiko Arano( T A)

Document Summary

Most people have language down by the age of six. If someone learns a language later in life, there is a different mechanism for learning. People do not tend to have as much success if they started learning after puberty. You may remember that the presence of critical period is one of the characteristics of the biologically controlled behaviors proposed by eric lenneberg. Yes, there are critical periods for many biologically controlled behaviors. Second languages acquisition- one major piece of evidence for the critical period comes from studies of language acquisition later in life. There is a steady decrease in success starting just before puberty, followed by no effect of age after the age of 16. Evidence from language deprivation- children cannot receive any language input. Genie- discovred in la in 1970 at the age of 13. She was kept in isolation until she was discovered and had no language input.