In the final analysis, people have been learning how to acquire language for millennia without the assistance of scientific investigation, but the need for young people to do so quickly in an increasingly multicultural country and globalized marketplace is more important than ever before because they will probably have to learn a second (or third) language at their earliest opportunity.

References

Birdsong, D. (1999). Second language acquisition and the critical period hypothesis. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. This book examines reasons why very young learners might be subject to a critical period for language acquisition.

Costa, A.R., Mcilvane, W.J., & Wilkinson, K.M. (2001). Emergent word-object mapping by children: Further studies using the blank comparison technique. The Psychological Record, 51(3), 343. This study confirmed the usefulness of the blank comparison technique in emergent mapping research and provided the first data set from school-aged children.

Danby, S. (2002). The communicative competence of...
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