The DOI matches its Crossref record; 7 of the 7 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
The Critical Period Hypothesis: A coat of many colours
Abstract
Research on age-related effects in L2 development often invokes the idea of a critical period – the postulation of which is customarily referred to as the Critical Period Hypothesis. This paper argues that to speak in terms of the Critical Period Hypothesis is misleading, since there is a vast amount of variation in the way in which the critical period for language acquisition is understood – affecting all the parameters deemed to be theoretically significant and indeed also relating to the ways in which the purported critical period is interpreted in terms of its implications for L2 instruction. The paper concludes that the very fact that there are such diverse and competing versions of the Critical Period Hypothesis of itself undermines its plausibility.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cites
The Biological Foundations of Language
Lenneberg, E. H. (1967) · Hospital Practice · doi:10.1080/21548331.1967.11707799 · Cited by 6,605
Maturational constraints on language development.
Long, M. H. (1990) · Studies in Second Language Acquisition · doi:10.1017/s0272263100009165 · Cited by 1,090
Distinct cortical areas associated with native and second languages
Kim, K. H. S., Relkin, N. R., Lee, K.-M., & Hirsch, J. (1997) · Nature · doi:10.1038/40623 · Cited by 1,071
Hawkins, R., & Chan, C. Y.-H. (1997) · Second Language Research · doi:10.1191/026765897671476153 · Cited by 851
Hakuta (2003) · doi:10.1111/1467-9280.01415 · Cited by 479
Neurobiological mechanisms of language acquisition
Pulvermüller, F., & Schumann, J. H. (1994) · Language Learning · doi:10.1111/j.1467-1770.1994.tb00635.x · Cited by 189
Guiora, A. Z. (1972) · Comprehensive Psychiatry · doi:10.1016/0010-440x(72)90019-3 · Cited by 108
Cited by
Age and second language acquisition and processing: A selective overview
Birdsong, D. (2006) · Language Learning · doi:10.1111/j.1467-9922.2006.00353.x · Cited by 544
Foreign Accent: The Phenomenon of Non-native Speech
Moyer, A. (2013) · doi:10.1017/cbo9780511794407 · Cited by 304
Vanhove, J. (2013) · PLoS ONE · doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0069172 · Cited by 158
Selective effects of age of acquisition on morphological priming: evidence for a sensitive period.
Veríssimo, J., Heyer, V., Jacob, G., & Clahsen, H. (2018) · Language Acquisition · doi:10.1080/10489223.2017.1346104 · Cited by 75
What’s age got to do with it? Accounting for individual factors in second language accent
Moyer, A. (2014) · Studies in Second Language Learning and Teaching · doi:10.14746/ssllt.2014.4.3.4 · Cited by 41
Metadata
- Authors
- Singleton, D.
- Venue
- IRAL - International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching
- Publisher
- Walter de Gruyter GmbH
- Published
- 2005-11
- Volume
- 43
- Issue
- 4
- Pages
- 269-285
- ISSN
- 0019-042X (ISSN-L)
- 1613-4141
- OpenAlex
- W2094421831
- Cited by
- 217
- References
- 7
- FWCI
- 32.61
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: The Critical Period Hypothesis: A coat of many colours. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1515/iral.2005.43.4.269
- The paper
- Singleton, D. (2005). The Critical Period Hypothesis: A coat of many colours. IRAL - International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching. https://doi.org/10.1515/iral.2005.43.4.269
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.