Skip to main content

ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Hum. Neurosci.
Sec. Speech and Language
Volume 18 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2024.1456054
This article is part of the Research Topic Acquisition, Processing, and Maintenance of a New Language: Crosslinguistic Perspectives on Sequential Bi/Multilingualism View all 7 articles

Acquisition of a New Language: An Enriched Case Study Documents Language Growth without External Input in a Young Korean Child's Acquisition of English

Provisionally accepted
Barbara C. Lust Barbara C. Lust 1Suzanne Flynn Suzanne Flynn 2*Ahyoung A. Kim Ahyoung A. Kim 3
  • 1 Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, United States
  • 2 Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, United States
  • 3 University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, Wisconsin, United States

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    This paper explores a case of suspension of data input during the acquisition of a second language by a young Korean child acquiring English in an English only nursery school in the US. Data suspension occurred naturally when the child returned to Korea for a summer where only Korean was spoken. Systematic investigations using an enriched case study methodology which assessed the nature of the child’s English target language acquisition both before and after the Korean Summer revealed significant advance in his English after the Korean Summer despite the absence of English input during this time. Several hypotheses regarding the nature and explanation of this advance are tested. It is argued that significant internal linguistic integration leading to systematization of linguistic knowledge occurred in the absence of synchronous language data input, demonstrating the significance of internal computational processes over and above language data input in the language acquisition process. Results have implications for understanding the fundamental nature of language acquisition.

    Keywords: Korean, english, bilingualism, Second Language Acquisition, maturation, Language Input

    Received: 27 Jun 2024; Accepted: 14 Oct 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Lust, Flynn and Kim. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Suzanne Flynn, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, United States

    Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.