Critical period hypothesis

Hypothesis that younger people are better at language acquisition

The critical period hypothesis is a theory within the field of linguistics and second language acquisition that claims a person can only achieve native-like fluency in a language before a certain age. It is the subject of a long-standing debate in linguistics and language acquisition over the extent to which the ability to acquire language is biologically linked to developmental stages of the brain. The critical period hypothesis was first proposed by Montreal neurologist Wilder Penfield and co-author Lamar Roberts in their 1959 book Speech and Brain Mechanisms, and was popularized by Eric Lenneberg in 1967 with Biological Foundations of Language.

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