"Wild Child"

Do you think Victor's case supports Critical Period Hypothesis?

While Victor did learn how to say the word for "milk" in French, I do believe that his case strongly supports the Critical Period Hypothesis.  Without any human contact during the critical period in his life, he was not able to learn the sounds and utterances needed to form words, thus not allowing him to be able to speak as a child brought up in society would.  Throughout much of the film, we were able to see that Victor, although he could recognize the sound of his own name, could not produce any of the sounds that Dr. Jean Itard tried to teach him.  In one specific scene, when Dr. Itard uses the candle to show how the candle flickers differently with each sound, Victor is able to do the same, but does not produce sound.  He instead just blows the air through his mouth, which causes the candle to flicker.

Age of L2 Learners

I find it interesting that there really is no age limit on when someone is able to learn a second language.  Being a second language learner myself, I would definitely consider myself lucky for starting at such an early age because I was given more of an opportunity to further my growth and knowledge in the English language.  However, that does not mean that someone who is older has a disadvantage.  Again using my parents as an example, they both moved to the United States from Korea when they were in their early/mid twenties, which to some would be too late to learn English.  However, my dad's English is far better than some of the younger people that I know who have been here for at least ten years.  While I do not believe that practice makes perfect, I do believe that practice makes better.  Because he is a small business owner and constantly in contact with people every day, he is constantly expanding his social skills as well as expanding his knowledge of the English language.  Although he will call me every now and then and ask what a specific word or idiom means, he is learning just as much as a child would.

"Introducing Second Language Acquisition" Chapter 3

"Child acquisition of a specific language involves a process of selecting from among the limited parametric options in UG those that match the settings which are encountered in linguistic input."

I think this statement rings true when many children are learning a different language.  Growing up, I mostly speak Korean because my parents were born in Korea and only moved to the United States a few years before I was born.  It was not until my dad began reading to me, making me read to him and giving me spelling tests that I truly began to understand the difficulty of learning English.

In Korean, there is no "th" sound; everything becomes an "s."  For example, the word "something" would become "someSing."  This was one of the more difficult sounds that I had to learn when I was learning English.  Today as a fluent English speaker, I find it interesting that because my mom and my dad were born in Korea and mainly speak Korean, that they still pronounce the "th" sound as an "s."  It is definitely true that it is easier to learn another language as a child than it is to learn as an adult.