The linguistic genius of adults: Research confirms we’re better learners than kids!

I always thought that the cut-off date as a youngster was for learning the language with Native Level Fluency and Pronunciation. Not for learning the language period!

Thanks for sharing this study! In college, my linguistics professors cited the same kind of statistics, that we lost the ability to distinguish foreign sounds fairly young. Which was kind of odd, since in another class, we studied phonetics, and not just English phonetics. There were lots and lots of sounds we learned to produce and tried to recognize (for transcription) that didn’t appear in English.

On the other hand, after having tried to phonetically transcribe some Arabic, there were definitely some sounds in there that I couldn’t produce or distinguish. (Epiglottal consonants, anyone??) But I don’t really have a desire to speak Arabic, so I’ve never made an effort to learn epiglottal consonants beyond that exercise in college. I guess this means there’s hope–if I ever did want to learn Arabic.

I started learning Dutch at age 23. I speak it better than most of the natives with a virtually flawless  Amsterdam accent, work as a local government official and am occasionally asked by colleagues to check their outgoing correspondence for errors.

This without ever having had a formal lesson in the language…

I’m glad to see some researchers out there are disputing this myth! It
really is a myth that far too many people are convinced is true. What’s
annoying is that I can’t even change their minds by using myself as an
example! I’m fluent in two foreign languages (Japanese and French) that I
started learning as a teenager. But when people find this out, they
just dismiss it by saying I must have a “gift” for languages! So I’m
glad people like you are out there spreading the message that actually,
anyone can learn a language. I hope this website will continue to grow
and inspire more people.

I just finished reading all the comments.  I tried taking a Spanish class when I was 26 and got an F.  Then when I was 29 I really started seriously immersing myself in the language.  I retook that Spanish class when I was 30 and got an A.  I’m now 31 and  I am able to learn and remember new words much faster now than when I was in my 20′s.  The difference seems like night and day.

EFFORT has been talked about and I agree that adults can learn better than children with enough EFFORT.  .  I think weightlifting is a pretty good analogy.  Without weightlifting, adults will naturally get weaker and weaker.  But with with weightlifting adults can get stronger and stronger.

There’s more that I want to say to complete that analogy, but I need to put more thought into how to phrase it.  Anyway, Benny is doing a very good job without me.  Go Benny!

And for the biggest rebut of all time:

The majesty and grandeur of Latin. For over 1,000 years people learned Latin in school—and most definitely not from infancy. Students were (and still are) expected to read works of extreme artistry and sophistication in the target language. (Though I confess that the ugly hobgoblin of translation all to often rears its head in modern classrooms. I should cook up a video of me teaching Latin in Latin.) Moreover, for many hundreds of years it was the language of the university in Europe. The whole of medieval and Renaissance literature written in Latin should have put the kibosh on the inability of older students to learn a second language to high degrees of proficiency. 

While sensitive periods for facets of learning a language may exist, there is no reason they should hinder anyone. I hear about adults not being able to learn a second language and roll my eyes. Thomas More’s Utopia is a sophisticated piece of language written by a non-native speaker who never heard a native speaker.

It’s effort, motivation and willingness more than anything. Benny has inspired me to pick up Ancient Greek in 3 months. My goal is to be able to read an unmodified text of Ancient Greek (with some dictionary support) by the end of September.

Ναι, ἐγω γαρ οὐκετι παις την του τε Πλατωνος και του Ἡροδοτου γλοτταν μανθανω. δια τι ουκ;

I find feral children research totally irrelevant to adults who already speak a language natively learning a second one. There is simply no comparison.

Nobody’s mind becomes “ridged”. They just need to adapt to a new learning strategy.

 Thanks Benny, I am a totally new reader and I very much agree with you on this one.  I speak my native Swedish and then English, French and Spanish.  I feel that more than age, the number of languages you already speak is a factor in how fast you learn a language.  If you speak more than one language the confidence is there that you can learn another and there are the associations with known languages that makes retention in learning of other languages either.  I am not sure if there is science backing this up but it has definitely been my experience. 

I’m highly impressed with your work.  I’ll be back!

Keep fighting the good fight Benny!  Too many learners are discouraged enough. They don’t need this kind of misinformation to make it worse.  Anyone, anytime can learn another language!

Hey Benny,
I found this summary (http://www.zompist.com/whylang.html) of why typical kids learn languages easier than typical adults, which doesn’t get into FMRI research about the brains of kids under 5:

“Innate abilities aside, children have a number of powerful
advantages:

1) They can devote almost their full time to it. Adults consider half an hour’s study
a day to be onerous.2) Their motivation is intense. Adults rarely have to spend much of their time in the
company of people they need to talk to but can’t; children can get very little of
what they want without learning language(s).3) Their peers are nastier. Embarrassment is a prime motivating factor for human
beings (I owe this insight to Marvin Minsky’s The Society of Mind, but it was most memorably
expressed by David Berlinski (in Black Mischief, p. 129), who noted that of all emotions, from rage to
depression to first love, only embarrassment can recur, decades later, with its full
original intensity). Dealing with a French waiter is nothing compared with the
vicious reception in store for a child who speaks funny.”
So maybe you can use this to turn the subject on its head and show adults, who want to learn other languages, why they too can learn as easy as kids. Your own adventures are examples of the first two points. I realize that you don’t like to put yourself in situations like number 3, but living in a foreign country, I find that even as an adult, I get #3 from time to time. Particularly at work. I don’t like it, but I suppose it is good for me.

Yawn… another day, another elitist academic who thinks a “layperson” with experience doesn’t deserve to share his thoughts.

A linguist with no experience or credentials whatsoever in adult second language acquisition has no place to make hand-waving statements about said adults’ limitations. This seems nothing but logical to me. Stick to your field of specialisation.

It’s not anti-intellectualism, it’s anti-I-study-something-vaguely-related-so-I-can-tell-you-how-it-is-ism. It’s so incredibly narrow minded of you to compare my encouraging of adult language learners, and dismissal of irrelevant information from people who don’t know what they are talking about, to creationism and fear of science. What absolute waffle.

I have a background in engineering, which is science applied to the real world, and I take applicable science very seriously. I am not interested in getting lectured by people who think my pragmatism is an attack on academia.

I discovered the TED talk on the linguistic genius of babies by someone forwarding it to me FEELING DISHEARTENED. So I am not dreaming up the reaction. There is important responsibility in spreading a message through the media, how you prepare it, and predicting how people will react to it.

Seriously, these attacks on someone encouraging language learning and dismissing unscientific claims about adult limitations, gives the community of linguists who should be impartial scientists, a bad name.

And yes, I AM dismissing this rubbish “with absolutely no academic credentials or serious research to speak of”. I am not a linguist or language scientist. I only have real world experience, both my own and my observations of my students and thousands of other learners, and that is what I will blog about.

I’m 47 years old and in University. I have learned German, Russian, and now am learning French in the University programs. The vast majority of my classmates are in their 20s, but the only place where they have an edge on me is the speed at which they memorize vocabulary(and those damned cases in Russian).
What hinders all of us is that we are not living in the country where our language of choice is spoken. Those students who have skype friendships with native speakers do the best, hands down. This is difficult to manage for many of us due to the time differences however.

I feel there are two separate issues here:

1) Misinterpreting what she is saying

2) Disagreeing with what she is saying

Patricia Kuhl is very well-respected, and what she is saying is not that controversial. In fact, Alison Gopnik’s research (while not specifically about language) seems to agree with Kuhl’s findings. Kuhl and Gopnik are interested in how babies learn. Gopnik advances that a baby’s brain can perform Beysian statistics-unconciously. This is developmentally vital. It is perhaps what makes us unique as human. Gopnik applies this to other types of learning. Kuhl is saying this is how we learn our native language so well. She is also advocating that the brain can keep separate statistics for each language.

I have watched Kuhl’s talk several times and never found it confusing. I think she does, however, throw out sentences that can be misconstrued. She says “adults can’t decipher sounds outside their language”. You may be understanding her to say that you, Benny, can’t understand tonal languages. That’s not what she means. What she does mean is that you had to put some effort in to figuring them out. (She tries to demonstrate this with the kids learning the Chinese phonemes effortlessly. They hear all the differences in language, whether they want to or not–adults don’t.)

Consider these examples:

If I spoke English with tones, you may think I was silly, but ultimately your brain does not find these differences important—they aren’t *statistically* important. In fact, if you didn’t know tonal languages existed, you would probably either not “hear” the difference at all, or would not be able to understand how meaning is coded in such a way.

If I started, however, to change the way I pronounced -s in plurals such that I said “boothz” instead of “booths” and “cars” instead of “carz” you would find it really amiss. No native speaker would interchange vocalized and non-vocalized /s/ sounds, despite not learning which sound is used where. The reason you know which is correct, is again because of your ability to take statistics, and English has assigned the two sounds (s) and (z) as a plural morpheme to specific nouns—which you have learned as a child. (Think about how you know which “th” sound to use! Oy!)

Now, if someone takes the time to learn about tones, they can learn to identify them and use them. She doesn’t dispute that. But your book of statistics for this new linguistic technique is empty. It is going to take you a long time to fill it up in order to be near-native, because your brain is now wired in such a way that you must actually exert effort to learn this stuff. (see neural plasticity, and pre-frontal cortex development) As Alison Gopnik says, babies are wired to be explorers, adults are wired to be specialists. (One is not inherently better than the other.)

This is where your technique is probably superior to most. Your methods effectively fill your statistics book as quickly (and completely) as possible. I would say that this is most likely why Krashen’s Input Hypothesis obviously has some traction. The input is what helps you to take the statistics–i.e. learn and become comfortable with the language.

I feel that anyone who became dismayed at this TEDtalk did not understand it, because I honestly think she would agree with a lot of your techniques.

That said, I don’t know what to say if you disagree with all that, as you seem to debate the idea of the critical period. There is so much research being done on neural plasticity, that I’m not sure what there is to dispute. As others mentioned, the first-language critical period is actually not really debated. This is the slide that she shows at the beginning (note that it says “native language” in the bottom left corner of the slide). There is other research on the brain that shows how other skills are lost over time, others where new ones are learned. They’ve even shown how a lack of touch affects brain development.

I hope this helps anyone who feels upset with Kuhl’s research to take a step back and realize that she is on your side. She is saying that we can’t “learn like a baby does” — it’s biologically impossible. Instead, it’s wise to continue to use methods advocated here and harness the power that the adult mind has. They are different skills. Companies like Rosetta Stone and others have pushed this “learn like a baby” nonsense, and they are the real culprits. And honestly, learn like a baby? What? That’s not exactly a great promise considering how long it takes them. Adults should never be threatened by children–just learn to be outgoing like them and don’t care about people judging your skills.

Good luck.

Most people who learned a foreign language as a child were successful largely because they were surrounded by the language all the time. I started learning Spanish in the sixth-grade, but it was traditional class based learning where the teacher spend the majority of time speaking in English. I still remember lots of vocab, but unable to say much beyond “Yo quiero un cafe con leche por favor.”