Review: Newport Article
In the first chapter of the textbook, the author discussed the subject of learning as being “a long-term change in mental representations or associations as a result of experience (Ormrod, 1990, p. 4).” This relates to Elissa Newport’s article because she argued that younger children learn a first language more normally (grammatically correct) than late learners (after age 12). Also, Newport argued that native learners (children exposed to American Sign Language (ASL) from early childhood) learn quicker than older youths and adults because they could grasp the morphology of the words in smaller pieces and retain them easier. Newport had two hypotheses in her study, the first of which was about aging as a constraint against learning a new language (time limit??) and the second was in regards to how as one gets more nonlinguistic cognitive abilities (reading, math, art, etc.) it causes a decline in our linguistic learning abilities.
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One of the strengths of the article was how the author provided a second study to reinforce her theory about maturational constraints. In the second study, she examined subjects who had learned English as a second language during different age categories by giving them a language test. They were then graded on their performance on the test. Even though all the 46 subjects did relatively well on the test, there was a negative effect (r -.77, p<.01) due to age of