Adults ‘better’ than kids at learning new language

“... When asked to apply the rule to new words, the 8-year-olds performed no better than chance, while most 12-year-olds and adults scored over 90 per cent. Adults fared best, and have great potential for learning new languages implicitly, said Ferman.”

Original: No Childhood Advantage in the Acquisition of Skill in Using an Artificial Language Rule

Abstract: A leading notion is that language skill acquisition declines between childhood and adulthood. While several lines of evidence indicate that declarative (“what”, explicit) memory undergoes maturation, it is commonly assumed that procedural (“how-to”, implicit) memory, in children, is well established. The language superiority of children has been ascribed to the childhood reliance on implicit learning. Here we show that when 8-year-olds, 12-year-olds and young adults were provided with an equivalent multi-session training experience in producing and judging an artificial morphological rule (AMR), adults were superior to children of both age groups and the 8-year-olds were the poorest learners in all task parameters including in those that were clearly implicit. The AMR consisted of phonological transformations of verbs expressing a semantic distinction: whether the preceding noun was animate or inanimate. No explicit instruction of the AMR was provided. The 8-year-olds, unlike most adults and 12-year-olds, failed to explicitly uncover the semantic aspect of the AMR and subsequently to generalize it accurately to novel items. However, all participants learned to apply the AMR to repeated items and to generalize its phonological patterns to novel items, attaining accurate and fluent production, and exhibiting key characteristics of procedural memory. Nevertheless, adults showed a clear advantage in learning implicit task aspects, and in their long-term retention. Thus, our findings support the notion of age-dependent maturation in the establishment of declarative but also of procedural memory in a complex language task. In line with recent reports of no childhood advantage in non-linguistic skill learning, we propose that under some learning conditions adults can effectively express their language skill acquisition potential. Altogether, the maturational effects in the acquisition of an implicit AMR do not support a simple notion of a language skill learning advantage in children.

Edit: Choice snippets from the Discussion, in case you can't access:

“It has been suggested that children are less able than adults to use lexical–semantic cues during grammatical processing (Shallow Processing Hypothesis) [52].

The older participants may have also benefited from better working memory resources, more mature problem solving strategies [59], as well as from their previous, more extensive linguistic experience, including with morphological rules... Older participants may therefore have been more familiar with the notion that semantic distinctions can be conveyed through phonological patterns...

Our results however, may be taken as support for the notion that effective explicit learning abilities may in fact be helpful in learning (artificial) language rules and therefore, children being largely limited to implicit learning are at a disadvantage rather than an advantage [17]–[19], [59]. Older children and adults who presumably possess a more mature declarative memory system were superior to the younger children in acquiring the implicit (procedural) aspects of the language task as well as in discovering the underlying semantic distinction, both implicitly (as expressed in actual performance) and explicitly (overt report).

The current results, however, suggest an age-related improvement (between ages 8 and young adulthood) not only in the explicit discovery of the semantic aspect of the AMR, but also in the procedural learning of language aspects, including phonology. Several previous studies have already suggested that procedural memory for linguistic skills may not be fully developed in childhood; these include studies on language attrition [60] second language acquisition [28]-[34], [44], [46] and children with cochlear implants [61], where comparable learning conditions were available to older and younger learners. Our results, therefore, are in line with recent evidence suggesting that the procedural memory system may undergo maturation across childhood and well into adulthood in humans [17]–[19], [50], [59] and animals [62]...

Our results do not support the notion that while language abilities in children evolve slowly, children outperform adults in the long run [3], [22], [63]...

Our findings of clear age-related advantages between age 8 and young adulthood in learning a new morphological skill do not support a simple notion of a restricted developmental time window or a ‘critical period’ of heightened plasticity in linguistic skill acquisition. The finding that adults have effective language skill learning and express effective procedural memory for a language task, albeit in a laboratory setting, is a good indication that the basic mechanisms of skill acquisition (i.e., implicit learning) are not lost to young adults in the domain of language competence; our data suggest that the potential for language skill acquisition may even be superior to that available before puberty...

Our proposal states that there are two separate issues: the availability of effective skill learning mechanisms, in the domain of language competence, in adulthood and the effects of experiential factors that may block their full expression.

It was recently proposed [50] that while there is no childhood advantage in the acquisition, consolidation, and retention of motor skills, the consolidation of procedural memory for such skills may be less prone to interference by subsequent experience before puberty. In adults, the establishment of new skills may, under some conditions, be interfered with even by subsequent experience with a previously acquired well-established skill. Thus, it may be the case that in situations in which interference is minimized or absent, the adults' performance and learning advantages can become apparent, whereas in situations in which interference is ubiquitous, the adults' potential for learning cannot be fully expressed. One would hypothesize that an instance of the former type of conditions would be ‘immersion’ in a new language, in which case an adult advantage would be expected. However, whenever the exposure to a new language is closely followed by exposure to a previously well-established language, one would predict that adults would be disadvantaged relative to children. Rather than a simple notion of an irreversible loss of plasticity in adults, this proposal may provide an alternative explanation for the apparently conflicting results regarding the ability of children and adults to acquire linguistic skills. Thus, the adult ‘disadvantage’, found in some conditions, may reflect an inability to establish long-term memory given the specific structure of the learning experience. Other mechanisms, such as proactive interference, whereby previously established knowledge may compete and even interfere with subsequent learning, may also be at work in late learners and in some instances result in an early learning advantage [50].

This proposal may establish a correspondence between linguistic and non-linguistic skill acquisition; in the latter case, there is ample evidence for highly effective procedural memory in adults, including experience-dependent neuronal changes in low-level processing areas [13]–[14], [48]–[49]. Effective skill acquisition in adulthood was also shown in animal studies [62]. There is evidence suggesting, therefore, that rather than an irreversible loss of plasticity in adults, adult skill learning may be more strictly controlled than (but as effective as) skill acquisition before puberty [17]–[19], [50].

Altogether the current findings may be interpreted to reflect an age-related maturation, between childhood and adulthood, of both the declarative and the procedural memory systems in the context of acquiring a new linguistic skill. Under our laboratory conditions, maturation or accumulated experience, or both, between childhood and adulthood had a positive effect on the ability to learn each and every aspect of the language task.

We propose that the current data support the availability of effective language skill learning mechanisms in adults. The implication, which is empirically testable, is that in some conditions, adults are expected to manifest advantages in language skill acquisition, while in other conditions, they may do worse than children. The apparent childhood advantages, reported in many studies, may therefore reflect the effect of structural aspects of everyday language learning experiences that afford less than optimal conditions for adults to fully express their competence in skill (implicit) acquisition and procedural memory.”

And yet a Japanese 8 year old can still talk circles around me.

Kuma01 Wrote:And yet a Japanese 8 year old can still talk circles around me.

A japanese 8 year old has spent 8 years surrounded by Japanese and needed to learn the language to communicate with people.
I'm not sure how long you have been learning the language, but I doubt it is more than 8 years if an 8 year old can talk circles around you.
Unless you are taking this really slow, like 2-3 words a day, and a grammar point on special holidays

Nice and encouraging. Though most people would say that 8 years is already quite old. The prime for language learning seems to be between 2 and 5, when children can pretty much pick up any language within months by immersion. Not rule-based, of course.

Another problem is the definition of "adult." The adult subjects had a mean age of 21. At age 21, I still had a near-photographic memory. I find it's much harder for me now, 15+ years later, to memorize anything without mnemonic aids and spaced repetition (which is a bit harder to apply to procedural memory, but doable). And nothing is ever quite etched into my memory like things I memorized before my twenties (in fact, some things seem to be impossible to erase, like Iron Maiden lyrics and the like...).

Finally, when comparing if children or adults are better at language acquisition, I think the only way to go is a longitudinal tracking study rather than a lab experiment, and to control for time spend studying and exposure to L2. It could also simply be that few adults can invest similar time into learning a new language.

But I'm very pleased to see that there is so much serious research on language acquisition being done now. When I was an undergraduate in the mid-90s, it was still a joke. So pathetic that it actually dissuaded me from studying language acquisition more formally.

scoltock Wrote:

Kuma01 Wrote:And yet a Japanese 8 year old can still talk circles around me.

A japanese 8 year old has spent 8 years surrounded by Japanese and needed to learn the language to communicate with people.
I'm not sure how long you have been learning the language, but I doubt it is more than 8 years if an 8 year old can talk circles around you.
Unless you are taking this really slow, like 2-3 words a day, and a grammar point on special holidays

About 5 months, I have an academic level of understanding of every sliver of Japanese grammar there is, but that doesn't translate into conversational fluency. It's like Khatzumoto says, you'll constantly be conjugating verbs inside your head etc. Grammar points and vocab do not translate into natural fluency just like that, hence an 8 year old will still talk circles around most of us.

A 2 year old could talk circles around me, as I know literally no vocab (just a few words from anime) because I'm only halfway through RTK after burning out a couple of months ago. I was just saying that if we had 8 years to learn the language, I would expect to be better than an 8 year old

nest0r Wrote:[...] Thus, it may be the case that in situations in which interference is minimized or absent, the adults' performance and learning advantages can become apparent, whereas in situations in which interference is ubiquitous, the adults' potential for learning cannot be fully expressed. One would hypothesize that an instance of the former type of conditions would be ‘immersion’ in a new language, in which case an adult advantage would be expected. However, whenever the exposure to a new language is closely followed by exposure to a previously well-established language, one would predict that adults would be disadvantaged relative to children. Rather than a simple notion of an irreversible loss of plasticity in adults, this proposal may provide an alternative explanation for the apparently conflicting results regarding the ability of children and adults to acquire linguistic skills. [...]

For me, this excerpt summarizes what I unscientifically think: adults have a hard time learning new things, including languages, because there is too much competing knowledge in their heads—too much interference and too much they can do with what they already know. The environment they've built around themselves also doesn't contribute at all, as they can simply live by reusing their previously acquired knowledge. There's no sense of urgency, so their bodies signal them, "why spend time and energy learning this when I can live well without making any effort? Let's conserve energy for when we really need them!". It's something closely related to homeostasis.

There are essentially no hardwired age-dependent constraints. The hard version of the critical period hypothesis no longer exists, even for the most fundamental physiological elements of the human body. And most contemporary research that examines language evolution as being substantively cultural has its own understanding of an early language bias. You just need to use your mature, always plastic brain to optimize learning to make up for cultural influences and pressures.

I really wish these studies had a more fMRI base to them as well. It would be nice to be able to say 8 year olds are bad at this because X part of their brain is too plastic while compared to adults its solid. Otherwise, all this might be indicative of is that younger kids are not being taught the right set of tools to help them break down these rule based constructs; in order to learn the pattern. However, 12year olds who are further in schooling, may have been exposed to facts/ideas/tools that aid them.

Regardless, I still think the big thing kids have over adults is simply in rapid memory formation. It takes a kid fewer repetitions to begin potentialization of new words, sounds, basic rule structures; than it does an adult because of the difference in brain plasticity. The point made on interference is also fairly valid, although I haven't seen (not that I have really looked) any explanation as to what/how interference arises at the neural level. Could it simply be that as synaptic connections are created over time, there slowly approaches a threshold where the most optimal connection sites are now taken up so more "roundabout" ways must be found. In a sense this would be "some current point of info" interfering with the formation of a new memory.

@vix86 - The study looks at both implicit and explicit processes; also, one of the points is that the adults have a superior capacity for organizing information.

As for the brain stuff, none of what you said is true as far as I can see. In the old days (way back last decade or was it the '90s) people thought like that, but no longer, re: plasticity and fast-mapping new words, et cetera on the neural level. Plus as we've seen, there are other elements to encoding and maintaining new information that gives maturation benefits.

I've posted links to other research debunking stuff like the critical period before, might have to dig them up again.

Kuma01 Wrote:About 5 months, I have an academic level of understanding of every sliver of Japanese grammar there is, but that doesn't translate into conversational fluency. It's like Khatzumoto says, you'll constantly be conjugating verbs inside your head etc. Grammar points and vocab do not translate into natural fluency just like that, hence an 8 year old will still talk circles around most of us.

The only time I recall trying to conjugate verbs in Japanese is when I come across an unfamiliar word and I try to go backwards (conjugated verb to infinitive). Khatzumoto has some good ideas, and I think you're taking them out of context. Yes during the beginning/intermediate phases you will be trying to conjugate, but pretty soon (much faster than 4-6 years if you're diligent) things become automatic.

This is coming from someone who hasn't actually lived in Japan, but spent a lot of time writing and listening. I suspect someone who uses the language more often would be doing even better.

nest0r Wrote:@vix86 - The study looks at both implicit and explicit processes; also, one of the points is that the adults have a superior capacity for organizing information.

As for the brain stuff, none of what you said is true as far as I can see. In the old days (way back last decade or was it the '90s) people thought like that, but no longer, re: plasticity and fast-mapping new words, et cetera on the neural level. Plus as we've seen, there are other elements to encoding and maintaining new information that gives maturation benefits.

I've posted links to other research debunking stuff like the critical period before, might have to dig them up again.

I think the point we'd devolve into after much discussion would be "defining native level fluency." I've been over it once before in a past thread I know. I took a Language acquisition class in college. None of the literature ever seemed to argue that adults couldn't learn a language, though some did come close to saying adults learn with a handicap. What they did continually point out was certain nuances within a language that L2 learners just never seemed to be able to pick up on. One of the projects we did in the class dealt with Wh-Islands. If I recall it right, and its been 4 years since I did the project now, a sentence like "What pair of jeans Jane should buy?" or "What Billy read why the mayor said?" Even after years of exposure and immersion in English, you will still have L2 learners that will think some of these sentences sound correct. However anyone raised from a child to an adult in the language will know they "just don't sound right." It is these particular things that linguists point at to say that kids have 'something' that lets them learn a language better than an adult and gain a level of fluency that an adult L2 learner can't.

The thing is, something like Wh-islands is such an academic....I don't know, whats the word I'm looking for....teeth-gnashing? That its not something anyone using a language on a regular basis may ever run into unless they enter into linguistics.

I think you may have actually presented me with the critical period debunking articles once before now lol. On the topic of linguistic neuroscience though, they have studies showing that fast mapping new words is bull larkey? And what about the plasticity bit? The brain of a child IS changing and growing as they grow up (progressively slower as they approach puberty, but still). They have shown that none of that actually has any bearing on an advantage in language learning? I don't know, maybe I would have to reread some of these articles again. Adults and children learn languages differently, in some cases you probably could say that adults have the advantage that they can employ more refined techniques to learn grammar, vocabulary, etc. However, I think the thing that still catches so many people with children learning languages is that they need minor structure in language learning when compared to what an adult will need. Still, I know there are a number of arguments people give about this including: children have the patience and care of parents to help them learn a language, have no jobs/life/problems to deal with to interfere with learning, have full immersion 24/7, and are not self-conscious in language usage.

vix86 Wrote:Still, I know there are a number of arguments people give about this including: children have the patience and care of parents to help them learn a language, have no jobs/life/problems to deal with to interfere with learning, have full immersion 24/7, and are not self-conscious in language usage.

The main problem with these arguments is that they don't explain the universal ability of all children to learn language automatically. Children with uncaring parents who are impatient, self-conscious, and have to go work in coal mines at the age of 6 still learn language. If you took 100 random American babies and had them adopted by Japanese families, and then took 100 random American adults and had them live with host families, the babies would all learn Japanese whereas many of the adults would not.

Language is constrained by culture and the brain (general processes as there's no innate language device) so that it's easy for children to learn (see the work of Morten Christiansen, Nick Chater, Simon Kirby, David Birdsong, et al.); the problems adults have are systemic issues, not intrinsic neural issues.

Sorry if my replies are more terse and less satisfactory than usual, I have limited energy at the moment which seems to be accompanied by a very short, curt attention span.

I always wonder about the language studies that we are not comparing apples to apples when comparing the ease of use. If I sat through 5 hours of Japanese preschool every day, and had people kindly correct me when I made a mistake, then I think it would be very easy to pick up.

If I'm studying from books and podcasts for 1/2 hour in the morning before work, and never get any corrections or feedback, then it's rather different. The study points out how Adults and older kids can learn some rules much faster, since they can reason about the rule itself, not just go by repetition.

Looking at the number of times a particular word or phrase is used, helps a lot. If kids only saw a kanji once, they have very little chance of remembering it. Taking a method like RtK and encouraging them to create a story would work just like with an adult: fewer repetitions needed because the "rule" makes sense and is easy to generalize to new utterances.

That said, an immersive and nurturing environment is very helpful for learning a language, but I don't see how I can recreate that on my 1/2 hour drive to work and back each day.

@dzurn

The way I see it, immersion isn't required to be protracted and unbroken. It's merely about establishing a feedback loop that allows active, deliberate learning of particular language features or sets thereof to be reinforced through comprehensible output, receptive exposure, et cetera.

That loop needn't be continuous and extended. It's not all or nothing, either/or, as it were. That's the beauty of being strategic and metacognitive in one's approach to learning, it establishes a porous, flexible system more akin to something like Paul Nation's ‘Four Strands’.

Thanks, @nest0r.

I'm already porous. Not sure if I'm metacognitive yet, but I'm hoping there's an Anki stack for that.

Ha. You know what? That's something I've been thinking about a lot. Incorporating the cultivation of metacognitive awareness into cards. (See: http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?p...#pid142000) But also organizing that information in general. Those who haven't read much about it probably get a bit glassy-eyed when they see the word strewn about. ;p

Another idea you might want to look into is ‘resonance’, re: Brian MacWhinney. Here's a link: http://psyling.psy.cmu.edu/papers/years/...-kroll.pdf - There's a couple versions of that paper around, hopefully that's the most recent one. (I've linked to others before.)

vix86 Wrote:If I recall it right, and its been 4 years since I did the project now, a sentence like "What pair of jeans Jane should buy?" or "What Billy read why the mayor said?" Even after years of exposure and immersion in English, you will still have L2 learners that will think some of these sentences sound correct. However anyone raised from a child to an adult in the language will know they "just don't sound right." It is these particular things that linguists point at to say that kids have 'something' that lets them learn a language better than an adult and gain a level of fluency that an adult L2 learner can't.

It's possible that they think it sounds right because the structure is acceptable in their native language, the one they grew up with — that is, interference. Adults have been learning for a long time and constantly reinforcing what sounds right in their native language, so much that they tend to continue to use the same framework to judge things in another one. Thus, the longer they have been reinforcing patterns from their native languages — that is, the older they are —, the harder it is for them to overcome this process. Not impossible, but much harder, especially because they have to do something that kids don't; having to "unlearn" something like this, that has been reinforced for decades, is much harder than to learn something right from the beginning without having to deal with this problem, and even more if they are constantly falling back to their native language, even if only mentally.

Update: I was reading the article and found something that is relevant to this discussion:

Quote:"In second language acquisition, childhood superiority was specifically found for grammar [1]–[3], [26] and pronunciation [23], [27]–[28]. However, others have shown that some late second language learners can attain language proficiency that is equal or superior to that of early learners [4], [28]–[34] including in aspects such as grammar [29]–[32] and pronunciation [28]–[29], [34]. It has been proposed that the ‘early is better’ notion, in terms of speech and language achievements, may reflect environmental and cognitive factors such as the amount and duration of practice [23], [35], the level of education, quantity and quality of input [35]–[37] and interference [38]–[40] rather than sensitive period constraints. Several neuro-imaging studies also suggest that the identification of different brain activation foci for early and late second language acquisition [41]–[42] may reflect factors such as the amount and duration of experience or the nature of the language experience rather than a childhood window of opportunity [43]–[46]."

So there it is!

Notice the usage of the phrase ‘sensitive period’ which reflects the gradual shift even in the basic perception of what was previously known as a critical period, as awareness of the systemic issues you quoted and contemporary neuroscience prove such views incorrect and more parsimoniously explained by other means (such as evolutionary linguists' view of language has having evolved [as an emergent system that uses general cognitive features in conjunction with culture/usage/environment] to be easily learnable through distributional cues and suchlike by humans as early as possible.

Makes sense to me. I was always skeptical about the whole "critical period" thing.

Why is it so special that it takes a kid 6-8 years to become basic functioning in their language? Hell, they HAVE to speak it to survive even, and they're constantly immersed in it, and it still takes them 6-8 years? That's bullshit! I spent 2 months in Japan and improved a buttload! Granted, I'm better than a 2 month old that's for sure!

Okay, that was a horrible comparison. But the point is that I'm glad this research was done. "6 year olds" talking circles around someone who is learning for 2 months... Well, why are you surprised?

I think that most adults that learn a new language can learn lexical items much faster than children, but the one advantage children get is the accent and the grammar. They just start to know 'what feels right.' I think the more exposure L2 learners get, the more they too can get a feel for what feels right, but still not all L2 learners are able to get to this level if starting as adults. But the hardest is the accent, I think. Our brains just start to tune out sounds not related to our own language as young as 12 months, so for an adult L2 learner to perfectly get an accent down to the intonation, pronunciation, etc., is no easy feat.

Again, I think L2 learners can do all of this... but they still don't very often, at least not to the same level as a native child. But we definitely run circles around children in our ability to pick up vocabulary. I think 80% of the bulk of a language is learning vocab, though to sound natural, you do have to pick up the natural grammar and accent as well. There was a girl once, in the US I think, who was tied up in a room till age 13 with no human contact. So she knew no language at all, and was already past the 'critical period.' They tried to teach her language but found that although she was able to pick up the vocabulary very easily, she just never could get ahold of the grammar and ended up even as an older woman never really able to communicate with people. So I think vocab has far less of a 'critical period' than perhaps grammar and accent.