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nited Nations heldan international conference in Hamburg to discuss foreign language learning in elementaryschool, especially the best age to learn a foreign language. However, in the second meetingof the summary, American psychologist Carrol said: "About questions of whether childrenlearning language is better or faster than older people, unfortunately, there is no asatisfactory answer." (Carroll, 1969)Domestically, some scholars(Gui, Wang, Wu, Dai, Yang) analyzed and discussed theoptimal age for learning a language, but lacked of convincing experiments. However, in1985, the education commission did an investigation of English teaching in high school,which indirectly answered the argument. The subjects of this investigation were 57080students in grade 3 of totally 139 secondary schools, in 15 provinces. The middle schoolstudents in grade 3 were from Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin, Guangdong and other big cities,who basically started learning English from primary school. Test results showed thatstudents learning English from elementary school could get some good results, such asstudents in Guangdong and Shanghai, ranking first and third respectively. But someachievements are not ideal, such as the scores of Beijing and Tianjin are significantly lowerthan Jilin, Hubei and Anhui province. The poll also shows that students' performancequality mainly depends on the extent of other factors such as the leaders' attention, thequality of teachers, teaching plan, content and method, and the students' learning attitudeand methods, etc. The study and research results in recent years are identical with those ofmany foreign countries. (Yao, 2003)The sequence and regularity of second language acquisition are reflected in theprocess of the acquisition of phonetics, grammar, syntax and morphology. The numerousdomestic and international experiments and the results also focus on relationship of agefactor and pronunciation, grammar, syntax, lexical acquisition speed and eventuallylanguage level.

Chapter Two Critical Period Hypothesis and Sensitive PeriodHypothesis

2.1 The definition of CP
The Critical Period (CP), biologically is a period of time in an organism’s life spanwhen it is more sensitive to environmental influence or stimulation than at any other periodof time in its life. Critical Period mainly contains five components: an onset (or beginning),a terminus (or end), an intrinsic component (a maturational mechanism), an extrinsiccomponent (a stimulus to which the organism is sensitive), a system affected by stimulationduring the CP.The onset means the beginning of the speech capacity. It is marked by a peculiarlanguage specific maturational schedule. Some researches in speech perception in 1980reveal that speech perception is presented by 6 months of age. And researches on phoneticdiscrimination in 1970 show that children can discriminate phonemes within a few weeksafter birth. Lenneberg(1967), according to cerebral immaturity, thinks that the age of onsetis 2-3 years old.
The terminus is the end of language acquisition capacity. Lenneberg (1967) proposesthat at the age of 13 or puberty, human’s ability of language acquisition declines rapidly.The lateralization of the brain completes with the language function to the dominant leftcerebral hemisphere. It is also associated with the termination of a state of organizationalplasticity and a loss of adaptability and inability for reorganiza本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。