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Critical Period Hypothesis | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| hagen Triglot Senior Member Germany Joined 6971 days ago 171 posts - 179 votes  6 sounds Speaks: German*, English, Mandarin Studies: Korean | Message 57 of 60 30 October 2006 at 1:13am | IP Logged | |||||
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The three or four people I know with (near or perfect - I still can't quite decide) native like German accent acquired after puberty were all linguists, two of them phoneticians.
This suggests to me that the way to a perfect accent might just be another one for adults than for children. While children are very good at imitation (not only in language acquisition I suppose), adults typically learn well by abstraction and analysis. Apparently both ways can lead to success. I wouldn't want to compare the effort involved unless I had a way to measure how much "effort" it takes a child to imitate native speakers for several years. (Remember that children can get quite frustrated when they are not being understood.) 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
 Keith Diglot Moderator JapanRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6788 days ago 526 posts - 536 votes 1 sounds Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: Mandarin Personal Language Map | Message 58 of 60 30 October 2006 at 5:24am | IP Logged | |||||
Why are you talking about first languages? I certainly wasn't. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| puellanivis Pentaglot Newbie United States Joined 6622 days ago 11 posts - 12 votes 3 sounds Speaks: English*, GermanC1, Swedish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Latin, Mandarin, French | Message 59 of 60 30 October 2006 at 9:30am | IP Logged | |||||
Because we're talking about the Critical Period Hypothesis, not really just an ability to aquire a native-like accent. There is a whole ton more issues to aquiring a language than just sounding like a native. It has nothing really to do with imitation on the child's part, but rather some unknown ability of children to aquire a language simply by being exposed to it. Children in fact aquire their first language before they start speaking it, this can be seen by any parent using Baby Signs, where the child is more able to produce simple signed words before they are able to produce actual spoken words. The CPH centrally revolves around First Language Acquisition and is's extention to second-language acquisition is essentially just that, an extention of the original hypothesis. So, Why am I discussing first language aquisition? Because that's what the CPH is primarily about. If a child does not aquire a first language within their CP, they are essentially doomed to living a life without language. Wikipedia can likely explain this far better than I have the time to address it properly. http:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_Period 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Polyglot2005 Senior Member United States Joined 7199 days ago 184 posts - 185 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 60 of 60 27 November 2006 at 4:48pm | IP Logged | |||||
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This Jerry guy is amazing. His accent is about as close to native. As others have mentioned a few gramattical errors here and there and a few seconds here and there where his english sounds sing-songy. But wow, I would really like to know what texts/audio he used. This is yet another method I will have to try out.
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