PSYC 3100 Lecture 20: March 19 - The Language Debate.docx

• School: University of Guelph
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC 3100
• Professor: Pat Barclay

Document Summary

Sensitive period: language is best learned early in life, if there were a general learning mechanism we wouldn"t expect a sensitive period: ex. some songbirds many need to learn their species specific song, learned by listening and then producing some researchers have shown these birds can only learn the song in a specific age range. Evidence for sensitive periods: 2end languages and accents hard to hear different phonetic contrasts because of lack of exposure during childhood, feral children: vocabulary and grammar when they were discovered there were attempts to reintroduce them into society, they were okay with the vocabulary but the grammar was extremely hard for them to learn, very hard to form sentences some confounding variables because you don"t know if they had mental retardation before, cant determine causation, but overall consistent with the idea that there is a sensitive period.