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Onegroup of examples is to explain how CPH affects the first language (L1) acquisition.A child named Isabelle, whowas found at the age of 6 and half. She spent alone in a dark room before beingfound, but she succeeded in her language learning because she started learningbefore the Critical Period (Katsumi NAGAI, 2007). Another girl Genie,who was totally isolated for 12 years and was found at the age of 13 years and9 months by American psychologist Curtiss in 1975. At that time she had nolinguistic abilities, she could neither listen and understand nor speakanything; she could not stretch her arms and legs; her maturity index wasmerely one year. At first she only knew her own name and “sorry”; then shecould speak two phrases; after seven months she could understand several words;eleven months later she could speak 3 sentences; in 1979, her capacity ofAuditory memory was not different from that of 3 years old children (李兆增,2003).Her progress was so slow and slower than other children because she started learning a language(refers to English here)after the Critical Period (Katsumi NAGAI, 2007). Other famous example likeGenie is the “Feral Child” who was found by Amala and Kamla in 1920 (陆效用,2004). Another group of examples is toexplain how CPH affects second language acquisition (SLA).Patkowsty did a study on 67 highly educated immigrants in 1980 and found thatlearners who were exposed to second language (SL) before 15 received higher syntacticproficiency than the older learners (Rao Huiqing, 2007). Asher andCarcia investigated a group of immigrants in US who were Cuban native speakers.The critical finding was that, 71 percent of the participants, who arrived inUS before age 6, could speak like a native speaker, yet only 17 percent ofimmigrants who arrived after age 13 could do so (李兆增,2003). In 1975, Fathman did a research on 200 immigrantchildren who were between age 6 and 15 inWashington.The result proved that the children aged 12 to 15 received higher syntactic andmorphologic proficiency than the children aged 6 to 12. However, the latter didbetter in pronunciation (李兆增,2003). copyright paper51.com |