The hypothesis claims that there is an ideal time window to acquire

language in a linguistically rich environment, after which further

language acquisition becomes much more difficult and effortful. The
critical period hypothesis was first proposed by Montreal neurologist
Wilder Penfield and co-author Lamar Roberts in their 1959 book Speech
and Brain Mechanisms,[1] and was popularized by Eric Lenneberg in
1967 with Biological Foundations of Language.[2]

The critical period hypothesis states that the first few years of life is the
crucial time in which an individual can acquire a first language if
presented with adequate stimuli, and that first-language acquisition relies
on neuroplasticity. If language input does not occur until after this time,
the individual will never achieve a full command of language.[3] There is
much debate over the timing of the critical period with respect to SLA,
with estimates ranging between 2 and 13 years of age.[4]

Neuroplasticity, also known as neural plasticity, or brain plasticity, is

the ability of neural networks in the brain to change through growth and
reorganization

Neuroplasticity was once thought by neuroscientists to manifest only

during childhood,[7][8] but research in the latter half of the 20th century
showed that many aspects of the brain can be altered (or are "plastic")
even through adulthood.[9][10] However, the developing brain exhibits a
higher degree of plasticity than the adult brain

Lenneberg's (1967) on Critical Period Hypothesis

  Lenneberg theorized that the acquisition of language is an innate
process determined by biological factors which limit the critical
period for acquisition of a language from roughly two years of age
to puberty.
 Lenneberg believed that after lateralization (a process by which the
two sides of the brain develop specialized functions), the brain
loses plasticity.
 Lenneberg claimed that lateralization of the language function is
normally completed at puberty, making post adolescent language
acquisition difficult
 Lenneberg says that there are maturational constraints on the time
a first language can be acquired. If language acquisition does not
occur by puberty, some aspects of language can be learnt but full
mastery cannot be achieved.
Brown (2007) defines CPH as “a biological timetable during which,
both first & second language is more successfully accomplished”.
Ellis (1997) defines CPH as a period during which “target-language
competence in an L2 can only be achieved if learning commences before
a certain age is reached. (e.g. the onset of puberty)”

The critical period hypothesis was first proposed by Montreal

neurologist Wilder Penfield and co-author Lamar Roberts in 1959.
It was popularized by Eric Lenneberg in 1967 with his famous
book Biological Foundations of Language. Lenneberg proposed that
brain lateralization (the longitudinal fissure that separates the brain into
two distinct cerebral hemispheres) at puberty is the mechanism which
closes down the brain's ability to acquire language.
Noam Chomsky, who believes that children are born with an inherited
ability to learn any human language.
According to Chomsky, every child has a ‘language acquisition device’
or LAD which encodes the major principles of a language and its
grammatical structures into the child’s brain.
The main argument given in favor of the LAD was the argument from
the poverty of the stimulus (Poverty of the stimulus (POS) is the
controversial[1] argument from linguistics that children are not exposed
to rich enough data within their linguistic environments to acquire every
feature of their language. This is considered evidence contrary to the
empiricist idea that language is learned solely through experience. The
claim is that the sentences children hear while learning a language do
not contain the information needed to develop a thorough understanding
of the grammar of the language) , which argues that unless children have
significant innate knowledge of grammar, they would not be able to
learn language as quickly as they do, given that they never have access
to negative evidence and rarely receive direct instruction in their first
language
Chomsky claimed, that there is a critical period during which the human
mind is able to learn language; before or after this period language
cannot be acquired in a natural fashion. Although the rare cases of feral
children who had been deprived of first language in early childhood
seems to support the idea of critical period but it is not known for
definite if deprivation was the only reason for their language learning
difficulties as Sampson (1997:37) points out, “it is not certain if children
in cases of extreme deprivation have trouble learning language because
they have missed their so-called “critical period” or if it is because of the
extreme trauma they have experienced.”

CASES
The best studied case of a completely linguistically isolated child is that
of Genie (real name: Susan M. Wiley) who was isolated starting at 20
months of age until she was rescued at the age of 13 years 7 months. She
was locked inside a bedroom in Los Angeles, strapped to a child’s toilet
during the day and bound inside a crib with her arms and legs
immobilized on most nights (Curtiss 1977, Rymer 1993). She was not
allowed to vocalize, was not spoken to, could not hear family
conversation, or any other language occurring in her home other than
swearing (there was no TV or radio in the home). Genie emerged from
isolation with no development of spoken language and no
comprehension of any language with exception of a few isolated words.
After Genie was rescued, she was the focus of intensive language
instruction.

So-called feral children, those that have had no exposure to language in

their ‘critical period’ have helped to credit Lenneberg’s theory. Genie is
an example. She was kept in appallingly deprived conditions, with
almost no social contact or exposure to language until she was found at
age thirteen. Attempts were made to teach her language, but although
she progressed to the two-word and three-word stages like most
children, her lack of morphology was never remedied. She only grasped
simple grammatical concepts. ‘Had’ and ‘gave’ where her only past
tenses which were used rarely and her only auxiliary was ‘be’; never
‘have’ or ‘must’. She never used the demonstratives ‘there’ or ‘it’
although there were attempts at the definite article ‘the’. Genie
demonstrates that after the critical period, pragmatic skills can still be
developed but the structural knowledge of language is lost. She suggests
that a child must be exposed to language during the critical period, and
that after puberty language acquisition cannot reach its normal end point.
(Snow, & Hoefnagel, 1978, 1116) This suggests that universal grammar
is no longer operative as an LAD.

About Genie’s case, De Villiers is of the opinion that “It is unnecessary

to explain that such circumstances did not leave Genie intact in body and
mind. However, although she was malnourished, there was no evidence
of physical abnormalities sufficient to account for her behaviour, for she
had adequate hearing, vision and eye-hand coordination. She was
severely disturbed emotionally, having frequent but silent tantrums, yet
there were no other symptoms of childhood autism. The most likely
explanation was the chronic social deprivation she had suffered for those
twelve years” (De Villiers & De Villiers 1978, p.215)

Genie’s case has been extensively compared to that of Victor of

Aveyron, an eighteenth century French child whose life similarly
became a case study for research in delayed first language acquisition.
Victor of Aveyron was a feral child who apparently lived much of his
childhood alone in the woods before being found wandering the woods
near Saint-Serninsur-Rance in France. His case was taken up by a young
physician, Jean Marc Gaspard Itard, who worked with the boy for five
years. Itard named the wild child Victor, and estimated that the boy was
13 years old when he initiated the study. Itard, who was interested in
determining what Victor could learn, devised procedures to teach the
boy words and recorded his progress (Itard 1962)
In many ways, trying to establish verbal communication was the
ultimate goal of all of Itard's work with Victor. Much of his report is
devoted to explaining all the various tactics he used to teach speech. And
Itard was the one who gave Victor the most basic element in
communication - a personal name. By noticing that the Wild Boy
quickly turned his head whenever a visitor one day exclaimed "Oh,"
Itard decided on a name with this sound (in the French pronunciation of
"Victor," the "r" is essentially silent).
His most common utterances were simplified versions of “lait” (milk)
and “oh, Dieu” (oh, God). Still, he did associate specific actions with
meanings, acquiring a kind of pantomimic language. He was also able to
sympathize with and understand human emotions: Itard relates in his
notes a scene where Victor senses the housekeeper’s grief upon losing
her husband; seeing her tears, Victor gathers the extra plate and cutlery
from the table he has just set and “puts it sadly back in the cupboard,
never to lay it out again.” (Itard, 1806)

Study – 1
Johnson and Newport (1989) sought to probe the relationship
between the effects of maturation and the ability of an individual to
acquire a second language. They aimed at either verifying or
disproving the existence of age-related effects on second language
acquisition of grammar by establishing a correlation between age of
first exposure to a language and level of morphosyntactic accuracy in
that language.

Forty-six native Chinese and Korean speakers who had arrived in the
United States between the ages of 3 to 39 and had learned English as a
second language were asked to determine the grammaticality of a
variety of English sentences in order to determine their respective
knowledge of English morphosyntax. Subjects were divided into 4
groups depending on their age of arrival (age 3-7, age 8-10, age 11-
15, and age 17-39, respectively), and their overall performance on this
grammaticality judgment test was then examined for correlations
between age of arrival and test score.
The subjects had to judge the
grammaticality of 276 spoken English sentences, 140 ungrammatical
sentences and 136 sentences were the grammatical counterparts.
 These sentences
covered 12 types of English rules: past tense, plural, third person
singular, present progressive, determiners, pronominalization, partical
movement, subcategorization, auxiliaries, yes/no questions, wh-
questions, and word order.
These rules dealt with two different main categories of rules of
English, English morphology and English syntax. A native-American
female voice was used to record the test sentences. The subjects
listened to each sentence twice and then had to indicate whether that
sentence was grammatical or ungrammatical by circling Y (yes) or N
(no) on an answer sheet.
Findings
Johnson and Newport’s (1989) study arrived at an important conclusion
regarding the effects of maturation on language acquisition. Johnson and
Newport’s data showed a correlation between subjects’ age of arrival in
the United States and their performance on the test. While the ultimate
attainment of subjects exposed to English between the ages of 3 and 7
was consistent with the performance of native speakers, those who
arrived between the ages of 8 and 10 scored highly overall, but
universally lower than their younger counterparts. Again, with the 11 to
15 years of age-at-arrival group, there was a perceptible drop in scores
compared to the younger groups, yet the 11 to 15 year-old group scored
on average higher than their adult counterparts. After the study Johnson
and Newport (1989) simply stated, “Success in learning a language is
almost entirely predicted by the age at which it begins” (p. 81).
Furthermore, they argue that although there is widespread individual
variation in the competence of adult learners of a second language, a late
age of first exposure to a second language prevents native or native-like
performance in that language.
None of the adult learners scored within the range of the native speakers
or the 3 to 7 years of age-at-arrival group (and only one scored within
the range of the 8 to 10 years of age-at- arrival group), allowing Johnson
and Newport to surmise that after the closing of the critical period,
attaining a native level of proficiency in a second language is a virtual
impossibility.
In order to examine the effects of maturation on pronunciation, multiple
studies have been conducted, again often using immigrants with various
ages of arrival as subjects (e.g Flege, Munro, & Mackay, 1995; Oyama,
1976; Thompson, 1991; Yeni-Komshian, Flege, & Liu, 1997).

Study -2

In her study, Thompson (1991) study surveyed 36 Russian-born

subjects who had immigrated to the United States between the ages
of 4 and 42. Each of them was given three types of speaking tasks:

1. reading a list of 20 sentences which were intentionally “seeded”

with English sounds
2. reading a 160-word passage which had not been seeded
3. speaking spontaneously for one minute about their activities on the
day of the experiment.
The speech samples were then examined both by a group of native
English speakers who had little or no knowledge about or exposure to
foreign languages and linguistics, and by a group who was familiar
with linguistics and had had frequent exposure to the Russian
language. The judges were asked to rate the samples on a scale from 1
(no foreign accent) to 5 (heavy foreign accent).
Findings
Thompson’s results pointed that subjects who got the exposure to
English at early age spoke consistently and considerably better than
adult ones in term of foreign accent.
While none of the subjects were universally judged to speak English
wholly without a foreign accent, subjects with an early age of arrival
scored consistently and considerably better than subjects with a late age
of arrival. In fact, although Thompson’s study examined several other
variables to determine their influence on mastery of nativelike
pronunciation (e.g., sex, education in English, use of English at home
and with friends, pro-American orientation, among several others), she
concluded that because of the extremely strong correlation between age
of arrival and a subject’s ultimate attainment in pronunciation, relatively
little could be drawn from an analysis of the other independent variables.
Thompson’s conclusion that “the age at which [the immigrants] arrived
in the U.S. was the best indicator of the accuracy of their pronunciation
in English” (p. 195) points strongly to the notion that maturation is
overwhelmingly the most important factor in ultimate attainment in
pronunciation, and that a critical period proscribes late acquisition of a
nativelike accent in a second language.
Finally, Thompson concluded that “the age at which [the immigrants]
arrived in the U.S. was the best indicator of the accuracy of their
pronunciation in English” (p. 195)
Subjects who came to the U.S. between the ages of 4 and 10 years were
judged to have a slight foreign accent. Results suggest that factors which
affect the acquisition of L2 pronunciation depend on type of primary
exposure to L2, and that perception of a foreign accent depends on
language samples presented for judgment and on the linguistic
experience of listeners. The study also raises the possibility that the
acquisition of fully accentless speech in L2 may not be possible if L1 is
maintained at a high level of proficiency, no matter how young the age
at which the individual started to acquire the second language.
In the first place, the type of
environment in which L2 was acquired must be considered
because predictors of success in acquiringa new sound system
differ in accordance with type of primary exposure to L2. The
second consideration concerns the choice of materials for eliciting
speech samples on which estimation of accent is based.
Materials with artificially high ratios of difficult sounds may
exceed the monitoring ability of even the most experienced L2
speakers and may result in a perception of greater accentedness
than would materials representing a more typical distribution
of L2 sounds. The third consideration involves listeners who
are asked to rate accents. Raters accustomed to hearing
accented speech may be more lenient in their assessment of
foreign accents than would be less experienced listeners. At the
same time, these raters are more reliable in estimating accents
than are inexperienced individuals. Finally, a difference must
be noted between subjects who have maintained their mother
tongue and those who have lost it when it comes to estimating
accent retention in the second language.

importance of early language exposure for normal cognitive

development comes from the controlled randomized study of the
orphaned Romanian
children (Bick et al. 2015). When Nicolae Ceausescu banned birth
control and abortion in 1966 to increase Romania’s population, many
overwhelmed parents left children in state institutions. By 1989 this
social experiment led to more than 170,000 children living in these
facilities (Bick et al. 2015). The institutionalized toddlers did not receive
much personal attention and were discouraged from vocalizing. In many
instances, these toddlers grew up in environments void of any rich
linguistic stimuli. In the 1990s a group of 136 toddlers free
of neurological, genetic and other birth defects were randomized and
half of them were assigned to a foster care, while the other half remained
in such an institution. Because the
toddlers were randomly assigned to foster care or to remain in an
institution, unlike
previous studies, it was possible to show that any differences in
development or behavior
between the two groups could be attributed to where they were reared
(Bick et al. 2015)

STUDIES AGAINST CPH

Long (1990) claims that the existence of a critical period in second

language acquisition is totally false.
He states, “The easiest way to falsify [claims supporting] would be to
produce learners who have demonstrably attained native like proficiency
despite having begun exposure well after the closure of the hypothesized
sensitive periods” (p. 274).

White and Genesee (1996), seeking to determine whether highly

proficient adult acquirers of a second language were indeed at a
nativelike level, they conducted a study on highly proficient adult to
determine whether acquirers of a L2 were indeed at a nativelike level,
tested 89 speakers of English as L2.
They used a grammaticality judgment task, a question formation task,
and an interview task in which they were evaluated on their performance
in terms of pronunciation, morphosyntax, fluency, choice of vocabulary,
and overall nativeness
Several of the subjects not only demonstrate an ability to achieve near-
native levels of competence despite their age of first exposure taking
place after the purported critical period, but White and Genesee also
found that “the performance of [these] near-native subjects on the
grammaticality judgment task, both in terms of their accuracy and their
speed, was indistinguishable from that of the native speakers, as was
their performance on the written production task” (p. 258). White and
Genesee do not deny the commonly held belief that a negative
correlation exists between age of acquisition and ultimate attainment in a
second language; those who learn a language at a young age, they admit,
are more likely to achieve near-native competence than those who begin
learning in adulthood. They do, however, challenge the notion that a
critical period exists in the domain of second language acquisition which
bars nativelike proficiency when language is learned after its closing.
White and Genesee argue that the existence of adult learners of a
language whose competence is indistinguishable from that of native
speakers proves that adults have access to the language learning
mechanisms to which children have access, and disproves the notion that
after the closing of a critical period, nativelike performance in a second
language is unattainable.

Many empirical studies on CPH (Dong, 2003; Wang, 2003; Shu, 2003;
Lu, 2004; Liu, 2005; Xin & Zhou 2006; Zhao & Zou, 2008) have been
found in Chinese EFL context.

Wang 2003, Liu 2005) studies show that there does not really exist a so-
called optimum age for Chinese learners. The author thus proposes that a
strong motivation, proper learning strategies and intense efforts are
decisive factors in successfully learning a foreign language.
There are two similar empirical studies whose findings support the CPH
in Chinese EFL context. Lu (2004) and Xin and Zhou ( 2006) analyzed
the influence of SLA beginning age on the postgraduates “English level
and found a positive correlation between early starting age and these
postgraduates” English proficiency. Thus, they suggest that, the initial
English program should be begun in elementary school rather than in
junior high. In addition, the optimal timing for the program is not as
early as possible. Grade 3 is a possible starting point, but Grade 4 or 5
may be more preferable.

CONCLUSION

Maybe we need modern studies to be able to get better answers

Though there are some studies in favour of the existence of CPH, there
are too many variables with strong factual support that explain second
language acquisition differences in learners, and too few factual
explanations of the critical period theory to warrant its belief.

Along with CPH, learner factors like age, motivation, anxiety, culture,
aptitude, cognitive style, learning style are also important in language
acquisition