Critical Period Claim Revisited: Reanalysis of Hartshorne, Tenenbaum, and Pinker (2018) Suggests Steady Decline and Learner‐Type Differences

A reanalysis of data drawn by Hartshorne, Tenenbaum, and Pinker (2018) from two-thirds a million English speakers showed that their overall conclusion one sharply defined critical age at 17.4 for all language learners is based on artificial results. We show instead discontinuous exponential learning with sigmoidal decay (ELSD) model, continuous ELSD model had better fit when applied separately to monolinguals, bilinguals, early immersion learners. Only nonimmersion later did have fit, 18.6 19.0 years age, respectively. These effects can be interpreted as schooling effects. suggest personal societal factors, including differences in living circumstances socialization, may bring about age-specific discontinuity patterns rate. The implication they are not the outcome cognition-driven developmental factors leading or more periods.