The Critical Period Regarding Language Acquisition

While sitting thru lecture this past Wednesday I kept having flashbacks to a class I took about a year ago. It was a language acquisition class and we were discussing the "critical period" of developing language. Up to that point in my life I had never really put any thought into such a notion but it sounded like a good idea. One thing jumped into my head, that was my nephew Jalen and how quickly he picked up words growing up. Thinking about him and comparing that to myself trying to learn Spanish helped me to wrap my head around the concept.

Spending time with my nephew growing up gave me a little insight to how quickly children develop the ability to learn new words. I would go over to see him and anything new that he saw would cause him to point and say, "wha dat?" he wouldn't even think about saying the word but he would point at the same thing over and over again. By the time I would leave he would have driven a couple of words into his head and mine, I remember the first time he did this I couldn't stop thinking about frogs (that was his discovery of the afternoon). Sure enough, the next time I went over Jalen pointed at the frog on his chair and uttered the word to me with a reassured smile on his face, then he pointed at the turtle and said, "wah dat?"

That story doesn't mean much but it unlocked something for me with regards to children and language. They go about their business one word at a time. Learning words like ball, cat, momma, and more. Eventually they build up enough they start to put together combinations and small simple sentences. Learning the grammatical rules as they go, making mistakes and correcting them eventually. All this happens during what we now call the "critical period" of language acquisition (pre puberty).

Why is the critical period important? Well, basically this is when the brain is in the entry mode of it's existence, it's all geared up for sucking in information. Our text book for class says that the average 1st grader understands 10,000 words and a 5th grader knows 40,000, break that down the the book says between 1.5 and 10 years of age you average 10 words per day.

So we all know that kids pick up language pretty quick, how about an 18 year old kid trying to learn Spanish at a community college. The first day of class (Monday) we were handed a sheet with 50 Spanish words on it, and told the quiz was Friday. If the average child can pull out 10 new words per day I should have been able to learn 50 words in 5 days. Wrong, I failed that quiz, and the class only got harder.

We really didn't spend much time learning to label the environment around us. Sure we learned what desk was and so on, but I didn't have the chance to point at something over and again like Jalen did. All the cue cards in the world don't add up to real experience like children get. Very quickly we moved onto grammatical rules, and simple phrases. The strangest thing about adults learning language is the fact that we don't really do it word by word. We do it with phrases you might use. If you were to ask me how to say library in Spanish I've got to think about it for a second, but if you ask me to utter the phrase, "Where is the library?" I can instantly say , "Donde es la biblioteca?" (if that's wrong I'm a bit rusty, but you get the idea).

My brain isn't prepared to learn a new language right now, I'm past that critical period in development. I will recommend one thing to my brother, that being Jalen needs to take a foreign language as soon as it's offered. Hopefully he won't wait till college and kill his GPA like I did for a couple of terms. People always say, "You can't teach an old dog new tricks" their wrong, you can, but when it comes to language; it's just gets a lot harder once you're out of that critical period.