This essay focuses on Sensitive Periods for Acquiring. Language and culture are both meaning systems that we acquire through our social

Sensitive Periods for Acquiring

Culture Learning a language is a necessary aspect of being socialized into a particular culture. As the linguist Edward Sapir put it, “Language is a great force of socialization, probably the greatest that exists” (Mandelbaum, 1951, p. 15). Language and culture are both meaning systems that we acquire through our social interactions, and they depend greatly on each other. Some would say that language is a part of culture-the communicating function of culture. Because learning a language and being

socialized in a culture are so closely intertwined, we should expect some similarities between language acquisition and cultural acquisition more generally. Is there a sensitive period for acquiring cultural knowledge? Measuring the acquisition of culture, unfortunately, is much less straightforward than measuring the acquisition of language. I’ve always been rather envious of linguists because languages around the world are different in such concrete ways that they are easy to measure. Each language has its own grammar, accent, syntax, morphology, and vocabulary. Cultures are far less tangible to study than languages. Whereas it’s easy to determine whether someone has mastered a particular language.

This is it’s not as straightforward

to determine whether someone has mastered. The buddy is  a particular culture. An inability to distinguish between the words “rubber” and “lover,” for example, is a pretty reliable indicator. This is that one is not a native English speaker. It is much more challenging to identify ways of understanding the world. This is that can indicate whether one has acquired a particular cultural meaning system. How could we investigate whether people have a sensitive period for acquiring culture? My students, Benjamin . We selected Hong Kong immigrants to Vancouver, Canada, because tens of thousands have made this move over the past couple of decades, and have done so at different ages (Cheung, Chudek, & Heine, 2011).