The crticial period hypothesis in essence contends
that the ability to learn a language is limited to the
years before puberty after which, as a result of
neurological changes in the brain the ability is lost.
unless exposed to lg in
the early years of life,
humans lose much of
their innate ability to
learn a language
Compelling evidence of
feral, confine and
FC don't provide the
best evidence partly
because of sub normality
Victor= suffered emotional
and physical trauma.
Genie = affect her
Language acquisition after return to civilization
“all is not lost”
A Theory of Neurolinguistic Development
John L Locke 1993
language develops in four phases
Bello, sometimes referred to as
the Nigerian Chimp Boy
Found in 1996. No one is exactly
sure of his age.
Found in the Nigerian forest
and is both physically and
Possibly the explanation for his
abandonment (practice within
the Fulani tribe).
Raised by chimpanzees
behaviors & walking like them
and displaying many of their
One of the more recent cases cases 2008 Vanya
Yudin ‘the Russian Bird Boy’ 7 years
His mother never spoke to
him and she simply
treated him like her pets.
When his mother
attempted to talk to the
boy, he didn’t speak, just
Never abused physically,
but still lacked of human
Learn Lg without
Not fluent enough
Accent & pronunc
Full control of syntax &
Vacabulary acq is
In the classroom
A problem arising from the differences between younger
learners and adults is that adults believe that they cannot
learn languages well.
Teachers can help learners
With this belief,
for ex, by talking about
the learning process and
styles, helping set realistic goals,
choosing suitable methodologies,
and addressing the emotional needs of the adult learner.
Children develop two parallel linguistic systems, so that
for any one word.
when the two parents have different mother tongues and
each parent speaks only his or her own mother tongue to
the child constructs two separate linguistic systems and
can handle each of them easily.
Another situation is when relatively young children who
have already mastered their mother tongue are adopted by
parents who speak a different language.
Once again, the distinction between the two languages is
crystal-clear for the child.
Children have only one signified for two signifiers and
so cannot detect the conceptual differences between
the two languages.
Compound bilingualism is what occurs when both
parents are bilingual and both parents speak to the
child in both languages indiscriminately.
The child will grow up to speak both languages
effortlessly and without an accent, but will never
master all the subtleties of either of them. In other
words, the child will not really have a mother tongue.
Late bilingualism is developed after the critical period
for language learning.
In such cases, it is thought that when people acquire
their second language through immersion in a
community that speaks it
Implicit memory plays more of a role, whereas when
they do so solely through formal classroom studies,
explicit memory is more involved.
More feral children http://www.toptenz.net/top-10-
David’s Enlgish Teaching World. The communicty
for taeachers fo English