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

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I wrote in great detail before about why adults are much better language learners than kids, but now linguists are starting to chime in!

There is a stupid rumour going around that you can't learn a language after a certain age (was it 6, or 12, or 14? I forget where the drunk blind man threw the dart that we have been basing this on) and considering I myself started properly at age 21, and how many people have been sharing their own success stories with me (if you have one, make sure to share it with all of us in the Fi3M Bootcamp community section – the best ones will get showcased on the blog!) I hope to have the ammunition to destroy this pointless demotivator.

The most discouraging TED talk I've seen

I've had some frustration over the years with the way a few linguists phrase things, because remarks that aren't backed up by relevant research can quietly discourage learners, and when they reach a big audience I think they're worth pushing back on.

One example is an otherwise fascinating TED talk, The Linguistic Genius of Babies. In it, the speaker presents the familiar “critical period” graph, where the ability to learn a language supposedly falls off a cliff from around age 17, and adds that no scientists dispute the curve. I'd gently disagree, because plenty do, and the picture is far more nuanced than a single downward line.

She also suggests that by age one we can no longer distinguish the sounds of a foreign language: “we can discriminate the sounds of our own language, but not those of foreign languages”. In my experience that's too strong. With a bit of focused training, and sometimes just a few seconds of really paying attention, most people can start to hear a sound they'd been missing. It takes longer for some sounds than others, but it's far from impossible.

Here's my real issue with research like this: it tends to test in settings children naturally win in, like a traditional classroom, and doesn't measure the areas where adults have the edge. So a headline like “children learn languages better” can leave perfectly capable people feeling they've missed their chance, when adults actually bring a whole set of advantages children don't have.

Happily, TED did later invite me onto one of their stages, so I got to make the counter-argument and, I hope, undo a little of that discouragement. Millions of adults around the world learn languages to excellent levels all the time, and any shaky research on this is arguing against an army of people who disprove it.

Linguists who are working for the greater good

Fortunately this is not the case for all linguists, and now popular research is backing up what I've been saying all along!

I was just on social media, and my friend Joop shared this link with me so I thought I had to get it on the blog:

Age no excuse for failing to learn a new language – New Scientist

Researchers realised that there are crucial differences in how adults vs children learn and tried to demonstrate it in this research. When they did, surprise surprise, adults come out on top. Once again, for more specifics about how I think this works on a broader scale – read my post about how you are not too old to learn a language.