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 To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface at: http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html and select "Join or leave the list" Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/