How Childhood’s Linguistic Critical Period Influences Adult English Language Acquisition Phonological Insights in Consonants for Chinese-English Bilingual Learners

Abstract

The Critical Period Hypothesis (CPH) has always been a topic of continuous debate in second language acquisition. This paper reports on a study investigating the ultimate achievement in English consonant pronunciation of late second-language (English) learners whose native language is Chinese. The research aims to explore the impact of the CPH on the ultimate attainment in English consonant pronunciation by comparing scores of adult and child English learners. This study involves speech samples from three groups of learners: one group is native English speakers as a control group, the second is late Chinese learners of English who are highly successful in listening, reading, and writing, and the third group is Chinese native speakers who started learning English from a young age. Professional native English speakers and AI will be used to score their speech samples. Throughout the experiment, we hypothesize the critical period does affect the production of phonological consonants. In addition, the results of the study could offer an enlightening point for pedagogy and could provide some advice for phonetic English learning in second language acquisition.