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Originally Posted by steven
By this do you mean that it's a point of no return for an L2 or a point of no return for language aquisition alltogether (as in an L1 is never completely formed)?
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It's kind of like setting concrete. Imagine your given a sack of concrete as a child. After some years, the setting agent in that concrete is going to be too old to work, so you'll never be able to make something of it.
You have a set number of years within which to lay the basic neurological functions for language use. If in those years you apply L1, then you have some basic capacity to learn any other language; a set concrete block you can put other materials on top of, even if you've run out of concrete. If in those years you don't even learn L1 then you have no foundation to build up language skills after your window of opportunity has gone.
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Originally Posted by steven
At any rate, that "Wild Child" thing your talking about is fascinating. I am going to do some studying on that. A lot of the research I've read seems to come from the 60's-80's (with the occasional early 90's material). That's just what I had access to in terms of books.. recently I've been trying to find stuf on the internet to make up for this deficit though.
Can you show me some actual sources of these cases? This is the only one that I have found (after a very brief search of course):
Oxana Malaya - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia |
Oxana Malaya is a good example as she was picked up when she was still aged about less than 10 and she's actually made a good language recovery. There was also the famous case of Genie, who grew up in extreme deprivation; she's not the best example for mere language deprivation because she was also physically mistreated, but she was discovered at almost 14, and was never able to recover language, although she did recover basic day-to-day tasks.
Obviously, experiments into language deprivation are rare and those that have been done are massively out-dated and massively fudged. A king supposedly experimented by having children raised by a mute, the result of which was that they miraculously spoke good hebrew (it being the first language told to Adam and Eve by God or something). So our main insights into it are from deafness cases, but i've never looked into them in depth. I probably have some hanging around though.
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Originally Posted by evanny
Columbine. but that age thing cancels out when person in question has already learnt 2nd or 3rd language, don't you think? anyone who knows 4 languages will pick up 5th very easily no matter the age - ok not in 80's but up to age of 60 should be fine.
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This is somewhat true; they do have much more propensity for language learning than others. However if we consider having truly 'learnt' a language as being the ability to use it natively, then they're still going to have difficulties. They will also get more interference from previously learnt languages, so whilst they are more likely to ~succeed~ in acquiring a good level of a new language compared to 30+ monolinguists, they are still not as likely to attain the pure fluency that a child could get.
It also depends on their L1 and L2 language. If a person has learnt Korean and English, they will have relative ease picking up French and Japanese. If a person has learnt English and Spanish, they will likely have similar struggles to pick up Chinese and Taiwanese as anyone else, BUT better learning habits, unless they are especially gifted (eg, a savant) And even if the Korean/English speaker has ease picking up French/Japanese, they would likely still struggle somewhat with languages like Housa or Arabic.
Compare this to the not uncommon situation of middle-class Indian children; they may speak FLUENTLY, their mother's village dialect, their father's village dialect, One or both of the two national languages (urdu or Hindi) and English before they hit their twenties, but after that they may not gain a 6th to quite the same degree. Someone starting to do the same feat aged 30 is likely to never outdo the child; the effect is -NOT- nullified, it is merely lessened.