I don't believe in the strong form of the critical-period hypothesis,  
at least not for people who learned language in early childhood  
(cases like Genie may be a different matter). This is based entirely  
on my own experience of having internalized many rules of German  
grammar while I was living there in my twenties without being  
conscious of what I was doing. When I got back to the States and  
looked at German grammar linguistically, I realized I had  
internalized rules (for the use of reflexive pronouns, for instance)  
that I had never been taught, and, further, that I had pretty strong  
native-speaker intuitions that enabled me to judge German sentences  
without explicitly thinking about the rules that governed them.

Maybe I'm just a special case.

Dr. Johanna Rubba, Associate Professor, Linguistics
Linguistics Minor Advisor
English Department
California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo
E-mail: [log in to unmask]
Tel.: 805.756.2184
Dept. Ofc. Tel.: 805.756.2596
Dept. Fax: 805.756.6374
URL: http://www.cla.calpoly.edu/~jrubba

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