Is there a critical period for L2 syntax?

Is there a critical period for L2 syntax?

1. YES

   • Lardinere's longitudinal study of Patty
     • study on ultimate attainment of L2 grammar + morphosyntax
     • Chinese-American adult immigrant learner of English - acquired English successfully under relatively ideal conditions
       • English skills serve her well allowing her to perform - bachelor's + master's degree, managerial position in US company, married native English husband, socialises with English speaker friends
     • not native-speaker English - has accent, noticeably non-native grammatical forms, informal writing
       • eg tends to omit past tense, make unnecessary shifts past-present "I met him and go out"
       • = some maturational constraints?
     • Failed Functional Features Hyp (Hawkins et al) - new interpretable features can be acquires in L2 but new uninterpretable features can't.
     • X 1 case study can't decide for all
   • Johnson + Newport - correlational research
     • 46 Chinese + Korean people who've learned English as L2 + live in US
     • age of arrival: 3-7, 8-10, 11-15, 17-39
     • grammatical judgement task - listened to sentence + judged whether grammatically correct. INcluded past tense, plural, 3rd person, determiners, yes/no q's, wh- q's, word order
     • age of arrival sig predictor of test success. age of arrival correlated with performance on test - earlier the better. late arrivals perform worse.
     • ultimate attainment in L2 strongly correlated with age of acquisition if before 17. No correlation after 17.
     • X length of residence min 5yrs - may not be enough for all learners to reach ultimate attainment level
     • X test had 276 items - too long to ensure continued concentration. lower scores of older learners may be because lost attention

2. NO

   • Morgan-Short et al
     • widely believed adults can't learn L2 in same way children learn L1, but recent evidence suggests L2 learners CAN come to rely on native-like lang brain mechanisms
       • Type of lang training impacts this
     • Artificial lang
     • longitudinal study
     • whether explicit training (traditional grammar-focuses classroom setting) or implicit training (immersion setting) differently affect neural (electyrophysio ERP) + behavioural (performance) measures of syntactic processing
     • performance of both training groups didn't differ at high/low proficiency.
     • ERP - big differences between group's neural activity at both proficiency levels in response to syntactic violations
       • Explicit training - no sig effects at low proficiency
       • only implicit training -> electrophysio signature typical of natives
     • suggests adult L2 learners can come to rely on native-like lang brain mechanisms but conditions are crucial to attain this
   • Friederici
     • electrophysio evidence that even syntax of lang learned as adult can be processed fully automatically
     • Trained adults in carefully constructed artificial lang - BROCANTO
       • trained group vs untrained group (only vocab training)
       • trained in more natural environment - learned through board game
     • Measured ERPs whilst listening to syntactic errors + correct control sentences
     • trained = high accuracy in lexical + syntactic tasks. Control = performed well for lexical but syntactic sig diff - only slightly above chance.
     • ERP patterns - big group diff
       • trained = clear amplitude diff between correct/incorrect. Virutally no effect for controls
     • = strongly suggests effects for trained group related directly to syntactic processing. But not definitive evidence whether it was processing newly acquired syntactic rules or transferred rules from L1
       • X Argued trained may have transferred German -> artificial. But controlled by 2 grammatical rules not found in German / known lang by ppts
         • = Must be caused by syntactic processing of newly acquired lang = mastered.
           • = supports theory that not just AOA (age similar for ppts) but proficiency level determines amount of cortical overlap in L1 + L2 processing
             • = indicates late-learned lang can be processed in native like way, so for L2 learning, maturational hyp version needs to be reconsidered