Donald G. Doehring Memorial Talk

For arborized trees, plant early:
Syntax and neurolinguistic processing in early vs late first-language acquisition

A talk by Rachel I. Mayberry - Professor - Department of Linguistics - University of California San Diego
 

Much theorizing about language acquisition posits that a successful outcome depends upon the age when it begins for reasons related to brain maturation. The bulk of research investigating this question comes from studies of second-language outcome in relation to the age of exposure. However, because second-language learning, by definition, entails language experience during infancy, it is not the purest test of the putative critical period for language. By contrast, individuals who are born deaf often first experience language at ages long past infancy. This situation provides a means to investigate the acquisition of syntax and neurolinguistic processing when the brain matures both with and without language. In this talk, I summarize two lines of research using this paradigm. First, when language acquisition is delayed until after early childhood, the trajectory of syntactic acquisition parallels that of infant acquisition but ceases at a low level. Second, the neurolinguistic processing patterns associated with post-childhood language acquisition differ from those of early acquisition in marked ways that begin to explain why syntactic acquisition is attenuated when the onset of language acquisition is delayed. Together these results indicate that the human capacity for language, rather than being fixed from birth, emerges from the interaction of post-natal brain growth and linguistic experience.