10. Age of Acquisition and success with a second language

There are many questions that researchers have about what is involved when very young children speak two or more languages. These questions re­volve around two themes: The first theme concerns differentiating the two lan­guages. Is it possible for the child to speak both languages well, but keep them separate? When these child bilinguals speak, do they just speak whatever comes out first, or do they mix languages? As an answer to these question in the 1990s a number of studies had just appeared or were appearing with extensive data supporting De Houwer's research (e.g. Deuchar and Quay, 2001; Genesee et al., 1995; Lanza, 1997; Meisel, 1989). Her Separate Development Hypothesis basi­cally states that very young bilinguals employ two separate grammatical sys­tems, one for each language, when they speak their two languages.

The second theme concerns the age of acquisition. Is there a cut-off point in language acquisition so that second-language learning is more difficult after a certain age? That is, what kind of support is there for a critical age hypothesis, the proposal that after a certain age, second-language learning cannot be done with the same ease as it can for very young children? Another question is, how do the abilities in a given language of early bilinguals seem to differ from those of later bilinguals?

The majority if scientists agree that they are simply doing what children of normal irtelligence can do, that is, they acquire the language varieties to which they are exposed. All normal children come with a genetic program that predisposes them to acquire human languages, so both children who end up as monolingua s and those who are early bilinguals go through similar stages of acquisition. Thus, the natural outcome for children is to speak whatever par­ents and other caregivers speak with them, whether it's one language or two or even more. Most researchers confidently assume that small children need actual exposure to a language in use (by other humans) in order to develop a linguis­tic system (i.s. a language). How important the extent and quality of exposure is remains a question, but clearly exposure is vital - children acquire whatever va­riety of a language they are exposed to.

What about becoming bilingual once the person is past his/her early years? The unswer is clear: later second-language learning isn't the same as early childhood bilingualism in many, many ways; it's more conscious and in­volves more efforts that don't pay off in great success. There may not be a sharp cut-off point, even though the ability to acquire a language diminishes be­yond an early age and most researchers agree that there is indeed a period in early childhood when language acquisition seems more effortless and definitely is more complete (by native speaker standards) than later in life. By the age of 9 to 12, the ability to acquire a second language with native-like ability falls off considerably.

Such results gave rise to what has been called the Critical Age Hypothe­sis. This hypothesis is often attributed to Lenneberg (1967) who was the most specific about suggesting the time around the onset of puberty (or age 13) as the end of the period for language acquisition. But far from all researchers agree on a single critical age and some don't agree with the idea of a critical age at all. At the time, studies on the effect of age of acquisition show mixed results.

Some researchers suggest that there is a fundamental distinction between a memory containing memorized material (called declarative memory) and an­other memory system which contains knowledge that is acquired or learned through repe ited execution of a task and it is called procedural memory. That is, Ullman's hypothesis is that, somehow, procedural memory is no longer as available as :t is for acquiring an LI in very young children. Thus, his sugges­tion is that late exposure to a language means that the learner will have to learn grammatical aspects of that language overtly (to "memorize" them). This hap­pens due to the fact that for some reason the learner has to rely on declarative memory, not procedural memory. In LI acquisition, declarative memory is only substantially involved in the learning of words (as well as other encyclopedic knowledge, e.g. "What is the name of the big river in Brazil?"). Thus, if expo­sure to any 1 anguage is late (possibly even past the age of four), acquisition is likely to be incomplete.

Questions and Tasks

1. How different would your life be if you were raised as a bilingual child? What language(s) would you choose to know from the early childhood?

2. Would you raise your children as bilingual? Do you see bilingualism as an advantage?

3. What difficulties in your opinion can there be in a bilingual child's de­velopment compared to one-of an ordinary monolingual child?

4. Analyze the process of each of your L2 acquisition. Did you have a cut­off point when you noticed that second-language learning is less successful after a certain age? Do you support critical age hypothesis? If you had to define a critical age after which second-language learning is more difficult, what would it be?

5. What are the factors that in your opinion account for the difficulties and degree of success that you have in acquiring a L2?

6. Did you have any problems of differentiating your LI and L2? What was it like? How did you deal with it?