COMPARATIVE STUDY OF AGE-RELATED LINGVOCOGNITIVE FEATURES OF SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION IN UZBEK AND ENGLISH LANGUAGES

Abstract

This article presents a comparative-contrastive study of the age-related linguocognitive features of second language acquisition based on Uzbek and English language material. The research analyzes the differences between child, adolescent, and adult learners in acquiring phonological, lexical-semantic, and grammatical competence in a second language, as well as the connection of these processes with underlying cognitive mechanisms. Drawing on the Critical Period Hypothesis, the study examines how Uzbek-speaking learners of English acquire linguistic material, and substantiates how the typological divergence between the two languages — the agglutinative nature of Uzbek and the analytic-inflectional nature of English — affects the processes of language transfer. The findings demonstrate that the age factor functions not only as a physiological but also as a cognitive-linguistic determinant of the quality and strategy of second language acquisition.