Example Of Article Review On Second Language Acquisition Research

Critical period hypothesis is not a new concept in language acquisation, because Roberts and Lennberg introduced and followed it up in 1959 and 1967 respectively in the neurolinguistic literature. They hypothesized that the recovery of brain from serious illnesses like trauma would be hindered by the maturation of the brain as one ages. Further researches on the above speculation, particularly those conducted in the behavioral sciences revealed that all the measures of language proficiency varies with the maturation of brain, but the proficiency scores gets low as the persons age increases. For these reasons, the hypothesized biological based critical period for a person to acquire competency and fluency in the second language has attracted many social policy makers and theorists.
There are no controversies on the speculation that the age at which an individual masters or gain competency of a second language declines with age. However, there have been controversies on whether the age at which a person is first exposed to the second language has influence in the person’s language mastery. Social and linguistics background together with the duration of exposure have been found to greatly influence the age at which a person gains language mastery. On this basis, the social science researchers agrees that learning of the second language is hindered by a critical period, but there is no agreement on the maturational age at which the above is hindered. Also there is no consensus on the reason why at that particular age the person’s ability to learn a second language changes. Additional studies however, have found that factors that are not related to ones language might also be the reasons behind this critical period, and they include, educational, cognitive and social factors.
A study of a sampled group of learners from the 1990 United Sates of America census had a number of revelations on the critical period. First, a leaner test on the individual’s age and levels of education on the critical period revealed that an individual’s to mastery of the second language changes with levels of education. The cohort variable enabled the researcher to know whether the time of exposure affects the proficiency along with age. The study findings revealed that for the early years of exposure to a language one maybe influenced and increase the language mastery, but longer time exposure of 10 years or more will not influence or improve an individual’s mastery of the second language.
In testing for critical period hypothesis change in the slopes in the regression lines or mean from the standards empirical cut offs implied that there is an existent of the critical period for the second language acquisition. To further tests for all the parameters included in determining the existence of critical period, local regression modeling was used to enhance deeper understanding since they are more sensitive in establishing the association between the variables. A study of age, immigration, amount of formal education and socioeconomic factors were found to be very influential in determining an individual’s ability to compete well in the mastery of the second language. These parameters when analyzed using local regression indicates linear decline in the proficiency with individuals increase in age. Therefore, it is right to conclude that an individual’s language proficiency declines with increase in age, thus explaining why children finds it easy to learn a second language more than adults who really struggle with it.