Blog 8:The Critical Period for The Deaf Child

Hey everyone!  I found a report online called THE CRITICAL PERIOD FOR LANGUAGE ACQUISITION AND THE DEAF CHILD'S LANGUAGE COMPREHENSION : A PSYCHOLINGUISTIC APPROACH
which talks about the Critical Period for language acquisition. The report mainly focuses on research done to show the differences and similarities between language acquisition of spoken languages compared to signed languages.

There is a common misconception that language constraints do not apply to sign language because it is not a spoken language. Many people believe that sign language can be just as easy to learn at age 30 as it is at age 3.
The writer of the paper tried out some experiments to prove that this is an inaccurate assumption

1st study:
Comparing the comprehension skills of native learners of ASL (deaf children who learned language from their deaf parents from birth), verses normative learners (learned ASL around age 9-16 because their parents didn't know ASL so didn't teach it). Basically, the native learners completely blew the normative learners out of the water. This proved that sign language is not so easy to learn when the critical period has been missed. More studies were conducted if you would like to read further feel free :)

The report goes on to talk about what exactly the critical period is. It's a hypothesis that language is best acquired during earlier stages of development. The hypothesis stuck around for 100 years until scientist Wilder Penfield showed the world neuroplasticity. Which in a nutshell is what younger brains have more of and so can retain information quicker and easier than an adults brain. This was discovered through many tests that often compared individuals with disabilities to animals who also suffered from a loss of a sense unnaturally-in the lab, sight was taken away during the believed "critical period" and afterwards the animal had a sight issue ever since because the brain developed with that lack of sight.

The article goes on to answer 4 research questions that explore the critical acquisition period and it's relation to individuals who sign. I encourage you to read it all the way through for the answers to those questions.

I really like reports like this because unlike many common articles that we can find in magazines or videos on YouTube, or links on Facebook to "credible sources", Reports such as the one I've shared today give you the full experiments that create the statistics we often cannot put into perspective.

The human brain works in certain ways, and because we all use a universal grammar, and that all languages fit within that category, I see sign language as a language no different from all others in the world. I believe that like any spoken language, ASL is retained better when taught during the critical period of a child's life. I've learned that children under the age of 11 who learn a second language can successfully speak that language without an accent, while children and adults who are older speak with accents. I see this as a clear sign that the critical period is real, and that even for people with disabilities, and even those who have a language that is communicated through a different lens have the ability to take hold of this window of opportunity. Or at least know that they don't get excluded from the rest of the world that learns a language.