Which Factors Determine the Differences between Adults' and Children' s Ability to Learn a Second Language?

Ever since the discovery of the 12-year-old boy Victor in 1799, who had been abandoned in the forest at birth and remained unreceptive to human sounds the rest of his life, there have been many hypotheses about the affect of age on language acquisition. Although some of them soon proved their validity for the first language, they were, for long, still open to much controversy in the application for the second one. In 1978, Catherine Snow and …

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