Middle aged? Nope, not too old to learn a language

Barbara Strauch of the New York Times writes that the brain doesn't get worse at learning during middle age, but rather it learns differently:

The brain, as it traverses middle age, gets better at recognizing the central idea, the big picture. If kept in good shape, the brain can continue to build pathways that help its owner recognize patterns and, as a consequence, see significance and even solutions much faster than a young person can.

And what is language learning if not recognizing patterns?

The article continues:

Educators say that, for adults, one way to nudge neurons in the right direction is to challenge the very assumptions they have worked so hard to accumulate while young.

Language falls into this box pretty nicely; most people have worked pretty darn hard in their native language (decades of English classes, anyone?), and learning a foreign language will certainly challenge your routine linguistic assumptions.

So this appears to be yet another reason to drop the lame "I'm too old to learn a language" dribble. However, it does seem to suggest that learning for middle-aged adults is going to be quite different from young adults and certainly from adolescents and children. The next step I'd like to see is someone digging into what learning methods are best for what age groups. As I'm not yet in the middle-aged group but am heading there quickly enough, I'd love a take-home message that could help me make my learning time more efficient.

Link: How to Train the Aging Brain [New York Times]

Best time to learn a foreign language: between birth and age seven?

Some scientists seem to think that that's what new research shows (hat tip: Steve Kaufmann at The Linguist on Language), but I'm not fully convinced because I don't think the scientists have ruled out that the cause of young children's language-learning ability is the kind of exposure they are getting rather than some innate age-linked ability.

Just to scratch the surface, let me point out some of the advantages of small children's learning methods.

Read more... Little kids get to learn solely or primarily through real-life exposure. Complete immersion in a language is not needed, but lots of exposure is. I can take my own four-year-old daughter as a case in point. She speaks English, Japanese, and Chinese, which we've pulled off mainly by me speaking only English with her, my Japanese wife speaking only Japanese with her, and hiring only Chinese-speaking caregivers who of course only speak Chinese with her. This exposure has gotten her to a point where she has been able to swing classes with native-speaking peers in all three languages. Could you imagine sitting down kids seven or under and going through a textbook with them and getting the same result? Ain't gonna happen, so kids are stuck (actually, I should probably say blessed) with learning through exposure.

The second thing is that the exposure is meaningful to them; if they want some juice, they'd better learn to ask for it. The same is not true of most of the textbook-based teaching methods that schools use. A lesson on buying shoes in Paris in a French textbook probably won't have any immediate applicability for you. Actual exposure will stick in your brain much better than constructed exposure, and actual exposure is all that kids under seven will typically get.

The new research also points to another benefit seems to be pretty clearly a method differentiation that benefits young kids:

Recall that Japanese "L" and "R" difficulty? Kuhl and scientists at Tokyo Denki University and the University of Minnesota helped develop a computer language program that pictures people speaking in "motherese," the slow exaggeration of sounds that parents use with babies.

Japanese college students who'd had little exposure to spoken English underwent 12 sessions listening to exaggerated "Ls" and "Rs" while watching the computerized instructor's face pronounce English words. Brain scans — a hair dryer-looking device called MEG, for magnetoencephalography — that measure millisecond-by-millisecond activity showed the students could better distinguish between those alien English sounds. And they pronounced them better, too, the team reported in the journal NeuroImage.

So someone saying a word slowly and clearly to you numerous times helps you get the pronunciation down. Shocking!

And the list goes on. Kids often get corrected by the adults around them, something that can only be done on a much more limited basis in a classroom setting. Kids aren't doing much else beyond learning languages, so they're not limited to 45 minutes a day of classroom exposure to the language. Etc., etc.

Now take people eight years old and up. How do they typically learn? The old-school classroom method. Actual exposure trumps textbook/lecture exposure any day, so it's hardly surprising that little kids are at such an advantage.

So, while there are certainly some biological aspects to small children's language-learning ability (small infants' ability to distinguish sounds, lost by the time they're one year old, comes to mind), I'd be reluctant to conclude that a large percentage of children's language-learning ability comes from some biological advantage when their learning methods' advantages seem so obvious.

Language-learning linkwrap 3/15/09

Old age begins at 27: Nevertheless, "abilities based on accumulated knowledge, such as performance on tests of vocabulary or general information, increase until at least the age of 60." That, of course, would include languages.

The Economist translated into Chinese by Chinese readers (in Chinese) (via Waxy): If you like The Economist and are learning Chinese, here's a chance to read all of the articles translated into Chinese. What's great about this is that you can always refer back to the original English if you're confused. Now I'm sure there's a copyright issue or two to be found in here...

Where Education and Assimilation Collide: The New York Times discusses the debate over how to teach all of the non-English speakers coming into the States.

日本語を勉強する (in English): Aspiring Polyglot has a nice bunch of Japanese language-learning links.