4.5 First and Second Language Learning Compared With simultaneous bilinguals, both languages are acquired in the same way. There are, as we have seen, cognitive differences that exist in bilingual children because of bilingualism, but the processes they use in acquiring their two languages are the same—the same as each other and the same as those used by monolinguals. In succes- sive bilinguals, however, there may be differences, and most of these are associated with the age of the learner. The age of the learner is highly relevant for the following reasons: • The experience of learning a first language means that second language learn- ers know more about what language is about and how it is structured. They are experienced in finding patterns in what they hear. Older children might experi- ence some temporary interference from the first language, but generally, the experienced learner is more efficient than the inexperienced and cognitively less well-developed first language learner. • Babies are born with more acute hearing than adults (Pearson, 2008, p. 103). Over time, their hearing acuity attenuates to adult levels. Superior hearing is part of the reason why younger children are better able to discriminate between indi- vidual language sounds and why they are superior mimics of the sound system. Second language learners will acquire the pronunciation of the new language faster and more accurately than children who begin after the onset of puberty. • Babies go through a babbling stage during which they practice the sounds of their language without either the pressure or the ability to produce perfectly formed words. Older learners do not have this practice period, and their hearing will be less acute than infants. Nevertheless, their improved cognitive processing abilities will compensate. • The “input” is different. For school-aged children, the first exposure to a new language may be at school. The language of the school differs in content and in purpose from the language of the home, and the older the learner, the greater the difference. • The older the learner, the more experience he or she has in learning. Even after the first language is essentially established, children continue to learn, and all prior experience in learning is potentially beneficial. For educators, the issue is how best to take advantage of it. CHAPTER 4Section 4.5 First and Second Language Learning Compared At the heart of the issue of age is the critical period hypothesis (see Chapter 3). Is there a critical period for language learning, as some believe? Popular wisdom that holds that where language learning is concerned, younger is better, would appear to be true. But is it? For a first language, yes, it does appear that there is an “expire” date on the brain’s abil- ity to acquire language. But the preponderance of bilinguals in the world, many of whom learned the two languages sequentially, is a compelling argument against a critical period for second langua.

1. 4.5 First and Second Language Learning Compared With
simultaneous bilinguals, both languages are acquired in the
same way. There are, as we have seen, cognitive differences
that exist in bilingual children because of bilingualism, but the
processes they use in acquiring their two languages are the
same—the same as each other and the same as those used by
monolinguals. In succes- sive bilinguals, however, there may be
differences, and most of these are associated with the age of the
learner. The age of the learner is highly relevant for the
following reasons:
• The experience of learning a first language means that
second language learn- ers know more about what language is
about and how it is structured. They are experienced in finding
patterns in what they hear. Older children might experi- ence
some temporary interference from the first language, but
generally, the experienced learner is more efficient than the
inexperienced and cognitively less well-developed first
language learner. • Babies are born with more acute hearing
than adults (Pearson, 2008, p. 103). Over time, their hearing
acuity attenuates to adult levels. Superior hearing is part of the
reason why younger children are better able to discriminate
between indi- vidual language sounds and why they are superior
mimics of the sound system. Second language learners will
acquire the pronunciation of the new language faster and more
accurately than children who begin after the onset of puberty. •
Babies go through a babbling stage during which they
practice the sounds of their language without either the pressure
or the ability to produce perfectly formed words. Older learners
do not have this practice period, and their hearing will be less
acute than infants. Nevertheless, their improved cognitive
processing abilities will compensate. • The “input” is
different. For school-aged children, the first exposure to a new
language may be at school. The language of the school differs
in content and in purpose from the language of the home, and

2. the older the learner, the greater the difference. • The older
the learner, the more experience he or she has in learning. Even
after the first language is essentially established, children
continue to learn, and all prior experience in learning is
potentially beneficial. For educators, the issue is how best to
take advantage of it.
CHAPTER 4Section 4.5 First and Second Language Learning
Compared
At the heart of the issue of age is the critical period hypothesis
(see Chapter 3). Is there a critical period for language learning,
as some believe? Popular wisdom that holds that where
language learning is concerned, younger is better, would appear
to be true. But is it? For a first language, yes, it does appear
that there is an “expire” date on the brain’s abil- ity to acquire
language. But the preponderance of bilinguals in the world,
many of whom learned the two languages sequentially, is a
compelling argument against a critical period for second
language learning.
The Critical Period and Second Language Learning Toddlers
appear to acquire their language—one, two, or more—with
relative ease and seemingly without effort. Older learners,
however, appear to struggle, and even when they become highly
proficient, many do not acquire a perfect, native-like accent.
Oth- ers stumble and falter and never manage to learn much of
the second language at all. At first blush, it might seem that we
can simply call upon the critical period hypothesis to explain
why children under the age of 5 are so adept at learning another
language, chil- dren before the age of puberty require more
assistance but can become extremely profi- cient, and adults
often struggle. But the fact that many adults do learn one or
more new languages later in life suggests that the matter is far
more complicated. Language teachers and researchers alike
increasingly suspect “that whatever enables the child to acquire
the mother tongue might not be lost forever, rather that it could
be hidden somewhere among or underneath our other cognitive
faculties” (Meisel, 2011, p. 1). If this is the case, then several

3. questions arise:
• Why are some learners better able to access this capacity
than others? • What is the role of language instruction, and
what kind of instruction will stimu- late this capacity? • What
other “cognitive faculties” are involved in language learning? •
How is the language acquisition capacity influenced by
these other cognitive faculties?
Because we cannot answer any of these questions with any
certainty, formulating a coher- ent and adequate theory of
second language acquisition is even more complicated than
formulating one for first language. Although the environments
may vary widely, with first language acquisition, we are talking
about learners who are all the same age. The theoretical issue is
to explain how and under what conditions the innate language
capac- ity is activated. Second language learners, in contrast,
are more diverse, impacted by the following:
• Age. We saw that some children effectively acquire two
first languages, some are early simultaneous bilinguals, and
some add a language much later. Many language learners are
adults, so age and all the attendant life experience it brings with
it is a major factor. • Reasons for learning. Children acquire
their first language or their second lan- guage, when it is the
language of their community, with relative ease. But people
have different reasons for learning another language, and these
can impact not only the speed of their learning but what they
ultimately learn. • Place. Children surrounded by a new
language in school pick it up easily. Learning a “foreign”
language, however, in a classroom setting when the language of
the
CHAPTER 4Section 4.5 First and Second Language Learning
Compared
community is a different one—as it would be for an English
speaker learning Finnish in Cleveland, for example—brings
with it another set of issues, all of which will impact the
learner’s success. • Method of instruction. As learners get older
and have more experience of formal instruction, they respond

4. differently to the ways they are taught. Some may be resistant
to unfamiliar methods, and this, too, will affect their language
learning.
When it comes to second language learning, young children do
appear to have certain advantages. First, they have less to learn
at a time when their brains are working hardest. Pearson (2008)
notes that young children’s brains “are working twice as hard as
adults’. The level of glucose they use rises until age two and
then stays twice as high as adults’ until around age nine” (p.
102). The younger the child, the less there is to learn to reach
age- appropriate proficiency. As an example, on average, a 4-
year-old child has a productive vocabulary of around 800 words
(Beauchat, Blamey, & Walpole, 2010, p. 18) and a much larger
receptive vocabulary. While it has taken her four years to
acquire those words, older students can learn that many words
in a matter of weeks. But the goal of a 10-year-old lan- guage
learner is not to sound like a 4-year-old. Second, the younger
learner is less skilled in avoidance and less prone to worry
about failure. Older learners, particularly adults, are very good
at finding ways to avoid using an unfamiliar language, partly
out of concern that they will get it wrong. Young children are
less skilled at avoidance and are more likely to jump right in
and use the new language, although there is often a silent period
at the beginning of the process. Given the added advantage of
the more-recent first language experience, younger learners
would seem to have an advantage. It would be a mistake to
conclude, however, that the ability to learn a new language is
lost with age. Indeed, as we have seen, there are cer- tain
advantages to age, the chief one of which is that experienced
learners are better at learning. What is important for educators
is to create the educational envi- ronments that are most likely
to lead to success.
So are there any theoretical underpinnings on which we can
base our approach to teaching a second language to young chil-
dren? The answer is a qualified yes. Remembering that theories
are not facts but represent an attempt to account for all the facts

5. that we have about lan- guage acquisition, let us look at the
main contenders.
There are different challenges that come with teaching older
language learners. These high school Spanish students will be
more skilled at avoidance than younger learners.
Associated Press
CHAPTER 4Section 4.5 First and Second Language Learning
Compared
Theoretical Perspectives on Bilingualism Let us begin with a
short history lesson. Before the 1960s, researchers assumed that
first and second language acquisition were completely distinct
processes. That assumption was not based on any empirical
data, and researchers studying the two kinds of acquisition paid
little attention to what those in the other camp were doing. It
simply hadn’t occurred to them that there might be some
similarities. Until the 1960s, both linguistics and psy- chology
were disciplines whose research agendas were largely grounded
in behaviorist learning theory, as described in Chapter 3.
Only after the constraints and restrictions of behaviourist
psychology had been shaken off could the language sciences
begin to understand lan- guage learning as a mental activity
happening in the cognitive system of the individual. Chomsky’s
(1959) famous and influential review of Skin- ner’s (1957) book
“Verbal Behavior” is a milestone to the “cognitive turn.”
(Meisel, 2011, p. 3)
The term cognitive turn refers to the shift in thinking that
occurred as researchers began to view language as a cognitive
event and the study of language acquisition as involving the
study of the mind rather than behavior per se. This change in
focus had a tremendous and liberating impact on the study of
first language acquisition and, eventually, on second language
acqui- sition, which was slower to shake the influences of
behaviorist thinking. Meisel observes that behaviorism lingered
in SLA because for many years, research had been dominated by
for- eign language learning in classroom settings as opposed to
second language learning in more natural settings. Most foreign

6. language teachers were using techniques based in behavior- ism,
and so there was little counter-evidence on which to build a new
theory,
From a behaviorist perspective, the task of SLA would be to
replace one set of habits (i.e., the first language) with a new set
of habits, the language to be learned. The first language was
seen as relevant only because it interfered with the second.
Instructional techniques, thus, were designed as drills to instill
the new forms and eradicate any imperfect ones that might be
created. Learners were given passages of text to memorize to
perfection, and relatively little attention was paid to meaning.
Generations of learners learned sentences for which they would
never have any use. Generations of learners completed majors in
foreign languages without gaining fluency or conversational
competence.
Following Chomsky’s review of Skinner’s Verbal Behavior (see
Chapter 3), researchers began to place more emphasis on
cognition, and eventually SLA researchers began to look at their
data from the perspective that the human mind might well use
the same processes that had been effective in learning the first
language in learning the second. Once they began to view
language data from that perspective, the central question that
they asked was different, and a new set of issues emerged,
making the matter of theory construction a great deal more
difficult. The central question that has guided SLA research for
the past four decades has been what kinds of knowledge the
second language learner brings to the task and whether and to
what degree he has access to that same innate capacity (called a
language acquisition device, or LAD, by Chomsky) as the young
child. Instead of focusing exclusively on differences between
first and second language learning, researchers, start- ing in the
1970s, began to look at similarities. One of the most influential
series of studies showed that the order in which second
language learners acquired English grammatical
CHAPTER 4Section 4.5 First and Second Language Learning
Compared

7. Morpheme Acquisition Order in Second Language Learners As
early as 1967, Pit Corder suggested that the errors that second
language learners make bear a strik- ing resemblance to those
made by children learning their first language. Over the next
several years, researchers began to formulate hypotheses based
on this notion. In the early 1970s, researchers began to work
from the hypothesis that the first and second language
acquisition processes were essentially the same. These
researchers went on to propose the creative con- struction
hypothesis, that learners do not merely imitate what they have
heard but actively construct their own rules, based on internal
knowledge. They postulated that if children were learning a
second language in the way that behaviorists claimed, then most
of the errors they made could be predicted on the basis of their
first language (i.e., interference errors). On the other hand, if
they were using innate mechanisms, their errors would more
closely resemble those made by first language learners. The
researchers studied the errors in the speech of 145 Spanish-
speaking children between 5 and 8 years of age, using a measure
designed to elicit particular grammatical morphemes such as
past tense, plural, present progressive, and so forth. They found
that only 3% of the children’s errors could be pre- dicted based
on Spanish, 12% were unique to the child, and an overwhelming
85% were developmen- tal, meaning that they were the same
ones English-speaking children make. A year later, they
replicated the study with 250 Chinese- and Spanish-speaking
children of the same age, and this time they were able to
establish an acquisition order for each of the two language
groups and for the combined group. They concluded that the
order of acquisition was virtually identical for the Chinese- and
the Spanish-speaking children. Following is the order they
found: 1. pronoun case 2. articles 3. present progressive 4.
copula 5. plural -s 6. auxiliary 7. past regular 8. past irregular
9. long plural (e.g., -es as in breezes rather than -s as in cats)
10. possessive 11. third person regular Nine of these were the
same ones studied by Brown and by DeVilliers and DeVilliers

8. (See Learning Grammatical Morphemes in Chapter 3). While the
order was not exactly the same for the first language speakers
and the second language speakers, what is compelling about
these data is that second lan- guage learners seem to follow the
same order, and that order is independent of their first language.
These results and others using similar methods led Steven
Krashen (1977, 1981) to formulate a natural order hypothesis,
stating that second language learners acquire certain language
structures in a predict- able order.
morphemes closely resembled the order in which first language
children acquired them (See Morpheme Acquisition Order in
Second Language Learners.).
CHAPTER 4Section 4.5 First and Second Language Learning
Compared
When the underlying assumptions changed and both researchers
and teachers began to view the second language learning
process as not unlike the first, the task of theorists changed as
well. Now, their job was to discover the nature and
characteristics of the human language capacity and how they are
activated, reactivated, and constrained throughout life. In all
likelihood, theorists will be working on these issues for many
decades, assisted by research on brain and cognitive function as
well as learning theorists. Because our primary interest here is
learners in early childhood, we are able to view second
language acquisition from the same theoretical perspectives
addressed in Chapter 3. More spe- cifically, theories of second
lan- guage acquisition that focus on the cognitive dimension as
well as the sociocultural context in which all language is
learned offer the best hope for account- ing for what learners of
all ages accomplish (Atkinson, 2011