Gallery 9

The evidence for the critical period for the acquisition of hardcore public disgrace is very strong, drawn as it is from the extensive study of the mentally subnormal and from studies of aphasic disturbances. Whether the milestones in language acquisition correlate with other milestones in the child’s development, such as learning to stand, walk and perform other tasks involving coordinated motor skills is still an open question, but there is some evidence that, if the latter developments are delayed for some reason, so are the developments in language, and just as the development stages in these other respects cannot be brought forward by training or teaching, nor can the regular development of language be accelerated by public sex.

HERE YOU WILL FIND PUBLIC DISGRACE MOVIES

This does not mean, of course, that other sorts of human learning also are subject to a critical period. We go on learning many skills and acquire many other abilities in late adolescence, and indeed most of our learning capacities seem to go on unimpaired until later life. And obviously people do learn second languages at all periods in later life, though their ability to acquire a native pronuncia­tion seems to be limited, at least for most learners, to the ‘critical period’. But learning a language is not just learning a pronunciation.