Abstract
This study was designed to test the Fundamental Difference Hypothesis (Bley-Vroman,
1988), which states that, whereas children are known to learn language almost completely
through (implicit) domain-specific mechanisms, adults have largely lost the ability to learn a
language without reflecting on its structure and have to use alternative mechanisms, drawing
especially on their problem-solving capacities, to learn a second language. The hypothesis
implies that only adults with a high level of verbal analytical ability will reach near-native
competence in their second language, but that this ability will not be a significant predictor of
success for childhood second language acquisition. A study with 57 adult Hungarian-speaking
immigrants confirmed the hypothesis in the sense that very few adult immigrants scored within
the range of child arrivals on a grammaticality judgment test, and that the few who did had high
levels of verbal analytical ability; this ability was not a significant predictor for childhood
arrivals. This study replicates the findings of Johnson and Newport (1989) and provides an
explanation for the apparent exceptions in their study. These findings lead to a
reconceptualization of the Critical Period Hypothesis: If the scope of this hypothesis is limited to
implicit learning mechanisms, then it appears that there may be no exceptions to the age effects
that the hypothesis seeks to explain.
Publisher
Cambridge University Press (CUP)
Subject
Linguistics and Language,Language and Linguistics,Education
Cited by
807 articles.
订阅此论文施引文献
订阅此论文施引文献,注册后可以免费订阅5篇论文的施引文献,订阅后可以查看论文全部施引文献