The traditional view of the critical period for language - going back to Lennenberg - is that it is part of a biological process: the decline in language ability reflects a maturational change in brain development. This view makes two strong predictions, namely, that children will be better at acquiring language than adults and that short of some kind of brain disorder, there's no way to change that fact. This view has been challenged in recent years in a variety of ways. Work on second language acquisition has found that adults are not always worse than children in acquiring a language. Moreover, particularly in the domain of phonology, there is evidence that second language learning can influence first language representations, suggesting a continuity between the two processes. In addition, alternative mechanisms to biological maturation have been suggested as ways to account for differences between adults and children. Chief among these alternatives are computationally influenced models which appeal to the radical differences in terms of specific domain knowledge and processing capacities through development.

We wish to address two related issues in this event: First, to what extent do language acquisition abilities decline in adulthood? Second, to the extent that adults are worse than children in acquiring language, what is the mechanism that causes this decline? We plan to consider these questions from many different perspectives that include different dimensions of language (Phonology, Syntax), different empirical approaches (Linguistics, Psychology, Neuroscience), and different empirical domains (L1 acquisition, L2 acquisition, Computational Linguistics). The goal of the symposium is to bring together scholars with a range of views and thereby foster debate and discussion.

The symposium will include invited talks by: