FIRST AND SECOND LANGUAGE LEARNING: A COMPARISON
Psycholinguists believe that there are critical or sensitive periods for the acquisition of first language. Few mothers will dispute the fact, even though some may fret if a twelve months old fails to utter her or his first intelligible words. During what Jakobson (1962, p. 72) called the Lallperiode--lallation (i.e. between six and ten months), the baby produces an amazing number and variety of phonological phenomena which are universal. It is at the height of this period that the baby begins to imitate adult sounds, that it begins to discriminate vocalic and consonantal phonemes. Thus the human begins to acquire and learn the "mother tongue".
Some linguists believe that the child learns a second language through a process much like that adopted in first language learning: though there might not be actual lallation, there will be phonological experimentation and, more important, the succession of linguistically developmental steps will be the same. Other linguists reject this hypothesis.
The real feud comes from the belief, on one side of the fence, that adults learn a second language the way children do and the way they themselves learned their mother tongue; and, on the other side, that children and adults learn quite differently, and that second language is learned differently from first language. The latter position even holds that it is neurologically well-nigh impossible for children beyond fourteen years of age or so to ever acquire perfect phonological competence in a second language.
Contrastive analysis reveals similarities and differences between L1 and L2. It is therefore interesting to examine empirical evidence for how similarities and differences affect learning, and, hence, the choice of pedagogical methods.
Assumptions regarding first language acquisition go farther still. It is generally said that comprehension precedes production, and most didactic te...