2005/11/01 by David Singleton · 217 citations
Arts and Humanities · Psychology · #EFL/ESL Teaching and Learning #Phonetics and Phonology Research #Language Development and Disorders #Period (music) #Silent period #Variation (astronomy) #Linguistics #Psychology #Epistemology #History #Philosophy #Aesthetics
paper · doi:10.1515/iral.2005.43.4.269
published in IRAL - International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching 43(4), 269-285 (De Gruyter)
openalex publication_date 2005/11/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/05/08
Research on age-related effects in L2 development often invokes the idea of a critical period – the postulation of which is customarily referred to as the Critical Period Hypothesis. This paper argues that to speak in terms of the Critical Period Hypothesis is misleading, since there is a vast amount of variation in the way in which the critical period for language acquisition is understood – affecting all the parameters deemed to be theoretically significant and indeed also relating to the ways in which the purported critical period is interpreted in terms of its implications for L2 instruction. The paper concludes that the very fact that there are such diverse and competing versions of the Critical Period Hypothesis of itself undermines its plausibility.