On the Evidence for Maturational Constraints in Second-Language Acquisition

Birdsong, David; Molis, Michelle R.

doi:10.1006/jmla.2000.2750

Cited by 507 publications

(411 citation statements)

References 27 publications

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“…Some late-arrival subjects scored high (one even scored at or near ceiling), and others scored poorly; while the group as a whole performed poorly and without a strong correlation between AoA and performance, certain individuals were exceptions to this trend. Birdsong & Molis (2001) point out the random distribution in the data for late arrivals, and contrast this with results from their own replication study (see below).…”

Section: Evidence For and Against A Critical Period For L2 Acquisitionmentioning

confidence: 69%

“…Birdsong & Molis (2001) replicated the Johnson & Newport (1989) study, with several notable differences in their results. Instead of using a sample of Korean and Chinese speakers of English as an L2, this study used only native Spanish speakers, thereby eliminating the original study's confounding factor of having speakers of two typologically dissimilar languages in one group.…”

Section: Evidence For and Against A Critical Period For L2 Acquisitionmentioning

confidence: 75%

“…While many subjects exhibited ceiling-level performance, the greater number of lower-performing scores for higher-AoA subjects is compatible with a general trend of age effects after maturation. The presence an unbounded post-maturational age effect extending well into adulthood is indicative of a "stretched 7" geometry, and is therefore not compatible Birdsong & Molis (2001) and others, a disaggregate analysis was conducted in which separate regressions were performed on data from the early and late AoA subjects. By separating the two AoA groups in a disaggregate analysis, we might expect to see clearer evidence of a discontinuity in the AoA function.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 97%

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Judgments of information structure in L2 French: Nativelike performance and the Critical Period Hypothesis

Reichle¹

2010

IRAL - International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching

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Section: Evidence For and Against A Critical Period For L2 Acquisitionmentioning

confidence: 69%

Section: Evidence For and Against A Critical Period For L2 Acquisitionmentioning

confidence: 75%

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 97%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Judgments of information structure in L2 French: Nativelike performance and the Critical Period Hypothesis

Reichle¹

2010

IRAL - International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching

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“…To elaborate, when Asian and European bilinguals were equated on language measures such as age of acquisition of the second language (English), number of years of English language instruction, and number of years spent in the US, the Asian bilinguals performed more poorly on listening and reading tasks than did European bilinguals (Bialystok & Miller, 1999;Birdsong & Molis, 2001;Jia et al, 2002). The authors argued that differences in proficiency are due to the tendency for many European languages to use an alphabetic script, as does English, thus facilitating language transfer (Jia, 2006).…”

Section: The Influence Of L1 (Serbian or Chinese) On The Mastery Of Lmentioning

confidence: 99%

Monolingual and bilingual recognition of regular and irregular English verbs: Sensitivity to form similarity varies with first language experience

Basnight-Brown

Chen

Shu

et al. 2007

Journal of Memory and Language

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We used a cross-modal priming procedure to explore the processing of irregular and regular English verb forms in both monolinguals and bilinguals (Serbian-English, Chinese-English). Materials included irregular nested stem (drawn-DRAW), irregular change stem (ran-RUN), and regular past tense-present tense verb pairs that were either low (guided-GUIDE) or high (pushed-PUSH) in resonance, a measure of semantic richness. Overall, semantic richness of irregular verbs (nested and irregular change) and of regular verbs (high and low resonance) was matched. Native speakers of English revealed comparable facilitation across regularity and greater facilitation for nested than change stem irregulars. Like native speakers, Serbian, but not Chinese bilinguals matched for proficiency, showed facilitation due to form overlap between irregular past and present tense forms with a nested stem. Unlike native speakers, neither group showed reliable facilitation to stem change irregulars. Results demonstrate the influence of first language on inflectional processing in a second language.Keywords semantic density; language transfer; morphological facilitation; cross modal priming; regular past tense formations; irregular past tense formations; mastery of inflection in a second language There is a long-standing debate in the word recognition literature as to whether native speakers of a language process irregular (e.g., ran-run) and regular (e.g., walked-walk) verb forms by common (single) or different (dual-route) mechanisms. Those who advocate a single processing system argue that processing of all words benefits from the extent to which words that are similar in form tend to be similar in meaning (

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“…[6,16]). It is generally assumed that the earlier that a language is acquired, the higher the level of proficiency eventually attained by the user, especially with regard to the syntactic (although also for the lexicosemantic) aspects of language [52].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Processing semantic anomalies in two languages: an electrophysiological exploration in both languages of Spanish–English bilinguals

Moreno

Kutas

2005

Cognitive Brain Research

176

122

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The latency of the brain response to semantic anomalies (N400 effect) has been found to be longer in a bilingual's second language (L2) than in their first language (L1) and/or to that seen in monolinguals. This has been explained in terms of late exposure to L2, although age of exposure and language proficiency are often highly correlated. We thus examined the relative contributions of these factors not only in L2 but also in L1 in a group of Spanish-English bilinguals for whom age of exposure and language proficiency were not highly correlated by recording event-related brain potentials (ERPs) to semantically congruous/incongruous words completing written sentences. We also divided our bilinguals into a Spanish-dominant subset who had late exposure and reduced vocabulary proficiency [as measured by Boston Naming Test (BNT) and Verbal Fluency Scores] in L2 (English) relative to L1 (Spanish) and an English-dominant group who had early exposure to both their languages although greater proficiency in English than in Spanish. In both groups, the N400 effect was significantly later in the nondominant than the dominant language. Although this slowing could be due to late exposure to English in the Spanish-dominant group, late exposure cannot explain the slowing in Spanish in the English-dominant group. Overall, we found that vocabulary proficiency and age of exposure are both important in determining the timing of semantic integration effects during written sentence processing-with vocabulary proficiency predicting the timing of semantic analysis in L1 and both age of exposure and language proficiency, although highly correlated, making additional small but uncorrelated contributions to the speed of semantic analysis/ integration in L2. D 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.Theme: Neural basis of behavior Topic: Cognition

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On the Evidence for Maturational Constraints in Second-Language Acquisition

Cited by 507 publications

References 27 publications

Judgments of information structure in L2 French: Nativelike performance and the Critical Period Hypothesis

Judgments of information structure in L2 French: Nativelike performance and the Critical Period Hypothesis

Monolingual and bilingual recognition of regular and irregular English verbs: Sensitivity to form similarity varies with first language experience

Processing semantic anomalies in two languages: an electrophysiological exploration in both languages of Spanish–English bilinguals

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