Age of second language acquisition: Critical periods and social concerns.
... During this critical period, learning any language is considered to be comparatively easy. Correspondingly, this concept of critical period implies that learning a language even a few years later in life (late adolescence or early adulthood) will become a much more challenging and laborious undertaking [27,28]. ...
Background and Objective: In an effort to study bilinguality, researchers in this field have often compared bilinguals with monolinguals, generally considering each group to be a homogeneous, monolithic body with no discernable within-group individual differences. This approach overlooks the various levels of proficiency among bilinguals, the age and order of acquisition of each of their languages, as well as their language history, and daily usage. Although monolinguals may not be conversant, some may still at least partially comprehend a second language. By failing to actively consider and collect more details about a variety of participant language attributes, researcher assumptions can lead to conclusions that are not a true reflection of the similarities and differences between monolinguals and bilinguals. A number of studies have found bilingual advantage in health-related outcomes as well as performance on cognitive tasks. All these reported findings are based on the performance of participants who may or may not be true bilinguals consequently impacting the results of this research [9,11]. Recommendations: The impact of considering a wide variable of participant characteristics in bilinguality research, including age and order of acquisition, daily usage, and fluency is examined. In addition, a recently proposed psychometric model that evaluates the above variables is discussed. Finally, recommendations are made on how to further improve the standards of research in bilinguality, including performing objective fluency testing, and asking detailed questions about participants’ complete language history.
... According to Birdsong and Vanhove (2016), younger learners are often connected to orally-related skills and effortless language processing. Barac andBialystok (2011, as cited in Ozfidan &Burlbaw, 2019) state that teenagers are better at listening skills and syntax. ...
There seems to be an increasing interest in acquiring and instructing
second language (Dixon et al., 2012). This is partly due because
of English's enormous global reach, but it's also due to such a surge in
interest in learning second language. As we know already the early
years of life are a crucial time for learning and growth. Young kids
gain languages and many other cognitive abilities at a high rate
throughout their first few years. Young adolescents at this age are also
highly open to second - language acquisition. Children who study a
second language at a young age are much more willing and able to
articulate or pronounce second language vocabulary like a native
English speaker and subsequently grasp the foreign language's
complicated grammar structure. Young kids might be less self-aware
than older children and adults in making mistakes. this aspect makes
them to be a quick absorber of a language. (Lightbown & Spada,
2006; Ellis, 1994).
... Researchers therefore have argued against assessing language dominance (Birdsong and Vanhove 2016;Quick Endesfelder et al. 2018), and proposed that language 'dominance' and the choice of language should be considered in relation to the topic and participants in a conversation. ...
This paper investigates code-switching in young multilingual children through a qualitative analysis. Our aim was to examine which types of code-switches occur and to categorize these in terms of children’s motivations for code-switching. Data were collected from 70 children aged two to three years who attended Dutch-English daycare in the Netherlands where teachers adopted a one-teacher-one-language approach. We observed seven types of code-switches. Motivations for code-switching related to social, metalinguistic, lexical, or conversational factors. These data indicate that young children can tailor their language choices towards the addressee, suggesting a certain level of meta-linguistic awareness and perspective taking. Implications for computational approaches are discussed.
... Yet, an obvious caveat observed from the accumulated literature is the lack of clarity and regularity in conceptualising the lingualism status of participants and the often-imposed categorical grouping of participants into one of these groups (Surrain & Luk, 2019). Concerns have been raised regarding the classification of individuals into respective language groups, specifically regarding proficiency (Hulstijn, 2012), language acquisition history and dominance (Birdsong & Vanhove, 2016;Silva-Corvalán & Treffers-Daller, 2015), and overall linguistic classification (Surrain & Luk, 2019;Takahesu Tabori et al., 2018). In some cases, for ease of analysis, multilinguals are problematically classified as bilinguals as justified by participant reports of "using predominantly two of the languages they knew" without using "the other one or two languages regularly" (e.g., Li et al., 2021, p. 3). ...
Global multilingualism is undoubtedly increasing, yet some contexts are linguistically more diverse than others purely as a result of the nature of linguistically diverse communities and, by proxy, passive linguistic exposure that individuals may experience by being immersed in the contextual milieu. How the sociolinguistic context of language use contributes to an individual's linguistic repertoire has yet to be fully conceptualised or quantitatively investigated within the language sciences. To meet this goal, I first explore this overlooked contextual linguistic feature through the development, validation, and application of a holistic language profiling measure, the Contextual Linguistic Profile Questionnaire (CLiP-Q). To this end, three research studies are presented. First, I develop and validate a psychometric tool, the Contextual and Individual Linguistic Diversity Questionnaire (CILD-Q as part of the larger CLiP-Q), which measures multilingual exposure and endorsement as pertaining to particular linguistic contexts. From an exploratory factor analysis with data from 353 participants (62.9% South African, 37.1% UK), a three-factor solution best describes the structure of the CILD-Q: Multilingualism in Context (contextual use and societal practice of multiple languages within a community), Multilingualism in Practice (direct and indirect linguistic exchanges and conversational interaction), Linguistic Diversity Promotion (societal and governmental endorsement of linguistic variation). The CILD-Q positively correlates with a metric of the social diversity of language use (language entropy) further evincing its convergent validity, and item scores corresponding to the three factors have sufficient reliability (α’s > .80). Second, I apply the CILD-Q to evaluate whether people who live in a multilingual context (South Africa) report greater contextual linguistic diversity than those from a predominantly unilingual context (England), as well as evaluate the role of language entropy, lingualism status (monolingualism, bilingualism, multilingualism), socio-economic status, and code-switching practice on this effect. Results demonstrate that contextual linguistic diversity differs between nations with South Africans scoring higher. The promotion of multilingualism is dependent on SES only in the England group, where England participants with higher SES score higher on Linguistic Diversity Promotion. Lingualism status is not contextually comparable when measured categorically, and code-switching accounts for linguistic features of South Africans. Finally, a positive relationship emerged between language entropy and contextual linguistic diversity, suggesting complementarity between measures that capture the social influence of language experience. Third is the application of the CLiP-Q to contextualise and appropriately categorise the language experience of South Africans completing tertiary education to investigate high-level text comprehension ability. The ability to draw inferences from auditory and written input is crucial for comprehension and successful educational outcomes, and is especially relevant in linguistically diverse contexts where learners have heterogeneous language backgrounds but are educated in the predominant language of the country. Such a case is South Africa, where tertiary education is almost exclusively received through the medium of English, though it is not the first language (L1) for the majority of citizens. Accordingly, the third study assesses the role of language experience (L1, multilingualism, and contextual linguistic diversity) and inhibitory control on high-level listening comprehension in undergraduate multilingual South Africans with advanced English proficiency. Results indicate that L1-English participants were more efficient and accurate at monitoring and revising their listening comprehension, while participants with higher contextual linguistic diversity were less efficient at monitoring and less accurate at revising the comprehension content. Furthermore, individual differences in inhibitory control were associated with differences in revision where participants with lower inhibitory control took longer to update the content and replace their initial interpretation for a new one. Participants’ L1 appears to supersede their advanced English proficiency on highly complex listening comprehension involving revision. In this dissertation, I demonstrate that the CLiP-Q is a holistic instrument with which to measure and quantify contextual linguistic diversity which, in turn, is relevant to a range of higher order linguistic skills essential for academic development.
... Bilingualism refers to language as a cognitive system. It deals with the acquisition of two language sets and is viewed as a continuum [3], encompassing a set of individual and context-related characteristics, such as dominance, age of onset, language history and status of language use [4,5]. However, across the literature, bilingualism has been investigated in terms of binary definitions and categorical labels that arbitrarily distinguish monolinguals from bilinguals, without considering the variability in characteristics, social implications or level of bilingual experience [6], leading to mixed research outcomes that do not exhibit sufficient replicability. ...
Despite the fact that the urge to investigate bilingualism and neurodevelopmental disorders as continuous indices rather than categorical ones has been well-voiced among researchers with respect to research methodological approaches, in the recent literature, when it comes to examining language, cognitive skills and neurodivergent characteristics, it is still the case that the most prevalent view is the categorisation of adults or children into groups. In other words, there is a categorisation of individuals, e.g., monolingual vs. bilingual children or children with typical and atypical/non-typical/non-neurotypical development. We believe that this labelling is responsible for the conflicting results that we often come across in studies. The aim of this review is to bring to the surface the importance of individual differences through the study of relevant articles conducted in bilingual children and children with autism, who are ideal for this study. We concur with researchers who already do so, and we further suggest moving away from labels and instead shift towards the view that not everything is either white or black. We provide suggestions as to how this shift could be implemented in research, while mostly aiming at starting a discourse rather than offering a definite path.
College-level deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) students and hearing students of English as a Second Language (L2) along with hearing native speakers (NS) of English were assessed in their knowledge of English resultative and depictive sentences. In “Kevin wiped the table clean,” the resultative phrase “clean” indicates that the table became clean as a result of Kevin wiping it. In “Megan drove the car drunk,” the depictive phrase “drunk” describes Megan’s state throughout the entire event of driving. Findings of a sentence-acceptability rating scale task revealed higher performance by the NS group compared to the DHH and L2 groups, whose near-equivalent performance improved with increasing overall English proficiency. Participants exhibited higher performance on active, passive, and unaccusative resultative sentences than on ungrammatical unergative resultatives and higher performance on grammatical than ungrammatical depictive sentence types. These findings contribute new insights into the comparative study of English acquisition by DHH and L2 learners.
The main goal of this paper is to suggest a combination of data analyses – notably generalized additive models, time-series clustering methodology, visual methods for significance testing and qualitative analyses – that relate to Complex Dynamic Systems Theory (CDST). To this end, we report on findings from a larger project conducted in a bilingual (pre)primary school in Switzerland, aiming to elucidate the complex ways that L2 English development emerges over time in 45 children who received German/English bilingual instruction over a period of eight years (age 5-12) in combination with emerging extracurricular exposure to English. The results reveal that increased extracurricular activities in English are particularly noticeable during periods of rapid development, but the effects seem temporally limited to the end stages of testing and strongly hinge on the cluster in question (i.e., learners with trajectorial similarities). We relate the findings to the “authenticity gap” between English inside and outside of school, as clusters who perceive a discrepancy between in- and out-of-school encounters with English also show rapid development that is characterized by increased English exposure during extracurricular activities. Methodological implications of adopting non-linear models, which can model complex dynamic relationships in order to better reconcile generalizability, variability, and individuality, are discussed.
This study investigates whether child second language (L2) learners can use syntactic information during the processing of sentences involving unbounded dependencies and how their processing patterns compare to those of child monolinguals and adult L2 learners. Through a self-paced reading experiment involving the numeral quantifier (NQ) construction in Korean, we tested participants' sensitivity to agreement violations between a noun phrase (NP) and an NQ in local and nonlocal conditions. The results showed that a subset of child L2 learners who demonstrated target-like knowledge of NP-NQ agreement in an offline task spent a longer processing time in the NP-NQ mismatch than in the NP-NQ match condition, in both local and nonlocal contexts. These child L2 learners' processing patterns were comparable to those observed in child monolinguals and adult L2 learners. These findings suggest that child and adult L2 learners rely on the same system of syntactic representations and processing mechanisms that guide first language processing.
One of the most fascinating, consequential, and far-reaching debates that have occurred in second language acquisition research concerns the Critical Period Hypothesis [ 1 ]. Although the hypothesis is generally accepted for first language acquisition, it has been hotly debated on theoretical, methodological, and practical grounds for second language acquisition, fueling studies reporting contradictory findings and setting off competing explanations. The central questions are: Are the observed age effects in ultimate attainment confined to a bounded period, and if they are, are they biologically determined or maturationally constrained? In this article, we take a sui generis , interdisciplinary approach that leverages our understanding of second language acquisition and of physics laws of energy conservation and angular momentum conservation, mathematically deriving the age-attainment geometry. The theoretical lens, termed Energy Conservation Theory for Second Language Acquisition, provides a macroscopic perspective on the second language learning trajectory across the human lifespan.
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