Interaction of the age and the aptitude

DeKeyser (2000)

One of the frustrating theories in SLA is definitely the Critical Period Hypothesis which is the decline of language learning after a certain age. In other words, I officially lost the chance to ‘master’ English according to the hypothesis! I wish I could go back to my pre-school days and go abroad to ‘master’ English.
Looking at young kids who literally ‘absorb, soak-in’ English with little effort, I assumed that there must be something that they have and adults do not have: implicit language-specific mechanisms, which I got to know from this article. Throughout the essay, my favorite part is that verbal aptitude plays a crucial role in acquiring L2, apart from the age effect. I’m not sure about my analytic ability, but it is good to know that there must be other huge factors to influence the SLA. I was kind of hoping that the result would be confirmed at the end, and it did! 

I’ve made a summary of DeKyser’s article, however, it was just from my jotting-down notepad. I started off taking notes about some key sentences and raised questions because this article seemed hard to understand at first. Then, I happened to make a rough summary :-)

1. The main goal in this article
1)Testing the Fundamental Difference Hypothesis (Bley-Vroman,1988) by age, verbal aptitude and their interaction
2)Replicate Johnson and Newport’s (1989) study, that ultimate attainment in SLA was correlated with age

2. Review of the literature
1) Age Effects on the Acquisition of Morphosyntax
-The pre-puberty group showed a strong ceiling effect, whereas the ratings for the post-puberty group were normally distributed. The results for a grammaticality judgment test were essentially the same as for the syntax ratings (Patkowski, 1980)
-Even when the L1 and L2 are more closely related, strong age effects have been documented (Coppieters, 1987)
-Those who learned L2 at a later age(after age15) did better than the younger learners, but what the older learners did better suggests only rate advantages for older learners. Therefore, the results do not contradict the CPH (Bialystock,1997)
-Learners past a certain age have trouble learning many structure, not that all structures are problematic for them (White & Geneses, 1996)
: The preponderance of the evidence shows that the critical period effect is pervasive in L2 acquisition.

2) The Role of Verbal Aptitude
Most research found that a high correlation between foreign language learning aptitude and success in the L2 is higher than the correlations between verbal intelligence and success in the L2.
Krashen(1981) claimed that analytic ability(“aptitude”) predicts success in “conscious leaning” whereas affective variables(“attitude”) are the best predictors of “subconscious acquision.” It would follow that verbal ability usually plays a more important role in adult learners who receive traditional form-focused instruction and less a role in informal acquisition by most adults.

: The verbal aptitude would explain the apparent exceptions to a strong age effect. A high level of verbal aptitude let L2 speakers to perform near-natively. One of major goal of this study is to assess the effect of verbal ability that is, foreign language learning aptitude, on ultimate attainment. Studying the effects of age and verbal aptitude, and their interaction should be more revealing them separately.

3. Hypotheses
1) A strong negative correlation between age of arrival and performance on a grammaticality judgment test, but some overlap between child and adult acquirers
2) Those adults who score within the range of child acquirers will all have high verbal aptitude
3) Different elements of grammar will show different correlations with age of acquisition. Not all structures are equally sensitive to the critical period effect.


4. Method
4-1) Participants
57 native speakers of Hungarian. 25 males, 17 females. 42 ppl were older than 16 when they immigrated. The range of age of arrival was 1-40. Have resided in the states for at least 10years. The average length of residence was 34 years. Average age from 16 to 81.
22 felt more comfortable with Hungarian, 20 more comfortable w/ English, 15 felt no difference. The measures for age of arrival, age at time of testing, aptitude, years of schooling, and grammar test scores.

4-2) Instruments
a.Grammaticality Judgment Test: The revised version of Johnson and Newport(1989) adjusting a bit to suit the participants
b.Language Learning Aptitude Test: The test consists of 20 five-way, multiple-choice items. The difficulty level for the 20 items ranged from .23 to .68 with a mean of .52
c.Background Questionnaire: A questionnaire about their language background, educational background, age of arrival in North America, and age at the time of the test.

4-3) Procedure
The grammaticality judgment test -> Questionnaire on backgrounds -> The aptitude test

5. Results
1) The correlation between the grammaticality judgment test score and age of acquisition was -.63. For adult arrivals, the correlation was -0.4.; for participants who arrived before the age of 16, the correlation was -.26
For high-aptitude learners, the correlation between the grammaticality judgment test score and age of acquisition was -.33, for the group with average or low aptitude: -.74
Here, numbers are all confusing!! :-(
2) Aptitude scores did not correlate with age of arrival
3) Low correlations for word-order problems in declarative sentences not involving adverbs, yes-not questions that lack do-support and gender errors in pronouns.

6. Discussion
Hypothesis 1
The hypothesis of a strong negative correlation between age of acquisition and score on the grammaticality judgment test was confirmed, however, the report of Johnson and Newport( an even stronger correlation between age of arrival and test performance for the early arrivals) was not replicated. Also, length of residence turned out not to be correlated with test scores at all

Hypothesis 2
The participants, who started acquiring English after age 16, got a high score on the grammaticality test and all but one had a relatively high aptitude score. This finding is in line with what the Fundamental Difference Hypothesis predicts: analytical, problem-solving abilities for adults

Hypothesis 3
As hypothesized, different structures showed different degrees of correlation with age of arrival. Only basic word order and pronoun gender seemed to be acquired at any age of arrival.

7. Conclusions and Implications
The study provided an explanation for why certain learners and structures appear to be exceptions to the critical period effect: 1) Adults with high verbal ability can use explicit learning mechanisms 2) Certain structures can be learned explicitly by all learners, regardless of verbal ability or age effect
It also provided evidence for Bley-Vroman’s (1988) Fundamental Difference Hypothesis by showing that explicit, analytic, problem-solving capacities makes adults reach a native level of competence in L2. Plus, this study answered Harley and Hart’s (1997) question about the role of language-learning aptitude in naturalistic acquisition by showing that apptitude is a predictor of ultimate attainment in L2.
Lastly,this study suggests that there IS a critical period for language acquisition especially to implicit learning of abstract structures. In other words, adult’s capacity to learn abstract patterns implicitly is extremely limited.

In conclusion, it says that the children should simply learn a foreign language in elementary school rather than high school(Patkowski, 1994) and it sounds perfectly plausible from the results in this study. However, elementary students in Korea seem to have as much difficulty and burden in acquiring English as adults. Since they are not in a native language setting, implicit acquisition requires massive amounts of input (Dekeyser,2000). As a ‘input lover’, I totally agree with the necessity of much input.
More and more Korean parents put their young children into English schools, but still the input is far too little in Korea. Both how to increase the input and what is the efficient way to learn English with limited input should be considered for learning English in Korea.