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> 2.1 Critical Period Hypothesis
One of the most talked-about issues in linguistics is concerning the CriticalPeriod Hypothesis (CPH) in language acquisition, the term proposed by Penfield andRoberts in 1959, who claimed that “for the purpose of language learning, the humanbrain becomes progressively stiff and rigid after the age of nine” (Penfield & Roberts,1959, p.236). The critical period for language acquisition refers to a specific period oftime when a language is likely to be acquired with a large degree of success but with little effort (Marinova-todd, Marshall & Snow, 2000). When this time period comes toan end, the difficulty for an average learner to acquire a foreign language with equalproficiency to the native speakers is substantially augmented.Later, Lenneberg (1967) put forward the Critical Period Hypothesis. He echoedPenfield’s notion about the “unphysiological” nature of late language learning andclaimed that after literalization—a process by which the two sides of the braindevelop specialized functions—the brain loses plasticity, thus renderingpost-adolescent language acquisition laborious. Adult and older adolescent learners’failure to acquire native-like language proficiency, according to the CPH, is ascribedto the loss of neural plasticity after the passage of a critical period for languagelearning. Afterwards, Lamendella (1977) asserted that Lenneberg’s view on thecritical period was too strong, and thus he made an introduction of “sensitive period”to place an emphasis on the assumption that it might be more efficient to acquire alanguage during early childhood but it does not mean that it was impossible to acquirelanguage in a native-like way at later ages (Singleton, 2003). Though adult learnersusually cannot achieve a native-like accent, under some circumstances, severalrespects of native-like accent have been confirmed, which shows that some certainaspects of accent can be acquired. For different subjects of linguistics, the criticalperiods, it is proposed, are different (Seliger, 1978), where, for example, phonologyand syntax are concerned, but in other subjects, such as pragmatics, no critical periodever exists.
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2.2 Definition of Stress
The prosodic word is the sole component that is concerned in this study, becausea prime word stress can be confronted in any stress language. Despite the fact thastress degrees are , though by no means always, related and variable in their absolutemagnitude among different speakers. (Jakobson and Halle, 1956:2), it generallycombines the features duration, pitch, and intensity on a particular syllable of a word(Lehiste, 1970), which gives rise to one syllable in given word to be more prominentthan others in the identical word (Couper-Kuehlen,1986).Word stress generally plays a pivotally functional role in linguistics. Stress only,in several languages, depicts the word boundary, and the stressed syllable in a word isplaced predictably (Rietveld 1980).However, in other languages, word stress mayfunction contrastively, where prime stress is not attached to a given position, anddisparate stress assignment in a word may give rise to a disparity in the meaning ofwords (e.g., Jakobsen and Waugh 1979, Waugh and Monville-Burston 1990).
Non-predictable stress languages are those whose stress is contrastive becauseprime stress is not fixed in a specific position. Relying on the word and what 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。