Elizabeth Marcus • I gather that many people on this tread agree with Singleton that Critical Period Theory “may well have had its day.” I am persuaded by your arguments that there may be more flexibility in the age-constraint issue than I had thought, that, as Tim points out in relation to adults forming emotional ties to a language, we are looking at strong trends rather than definitive constraints. However, his assertion that Critical Period Theory is a “rationalization for adult learners’ non-performance” seems to me thus far unsupported, and–I am willing to admit–personally rankles. I similarly question his assertion that “The constraints are not age-related in terms of some type of physiological developmental door being closed…they are only age-related in terms of openness to the mimic function which is modulated by the emotional states of identity and other affective factors. How do you explain the research that demonstrates that children adopted from a foreign country before puberty so thoroughly lose their first language as to be unable to distinguish it from any other foreign language, or that children temporarily transplanted to a foreign country when their parents are transferred for a few years, quickly gain fluency in the new language but lose it so entirely when they return home (if they so do after puberty) that they are unable to recognize their own taped voices speaking in the L2? (see links at http://archive.elizwrites.com/?page_id=2092) How do you explain the basic rule of evolutionary linguistics, that the more a language must be learned by adults (because of trade, intermarriage, conquest), the simpler it becomes, while the languages of groups living in isolation such that only children ever need to learn them are so complex that foreign adults are unable to master them (anthropologists living for years with certain Amazonian tribes, for example)? You all acknowledge that children learn language differently than adults; why do you find it so hard to believe that the brain changes over time as L1 is mastered? Kuhl has demonstrated that by 10 months infants have developed neural networks for their native language that interfere with their ability to distinguish other languages. Why do you find it hard to believe that children are programmed for language acquisition and that their brains focus on mastery of other tasks as they age, with the result that language learning becomes more difficult? It seems so logical to me.

Manuel Aicart • Tim, I’d like to make some remarks. I think it can be constructive criticism in preparation for your next lecture. I think trying to solve the language barrier through identity construal works more at a conceptual level rather than at a practical level. It can help, but I don’t think we should underestimate the physiological constraints. I’m sorry if this is not the case, but trying to ease language learning through affective measures reminds me of “suggestopedia”, which consists of enhancing learning by tapping into the power of suggestion. This theory tries to liberate the student from “the preliminary negative concept regarding the difficulties in the process of learning” but has been called a pseudo-science. Critics question the “nonconscious” acquisition of language, or trying to bring the learner into a child-like state (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suggestopedia). I’m not sure about bringing neurolinguistic programming (NLP) into this debate, since it deals more with psychotherapy, but I’m sure people interested in this topic are familiar with Bandler and Grinder’s Structure of Magic.

If there were not relevant constraints, or they were just some slight psychological/affective constraints “amenable to remedial measures”, how can we explain that many motivated adults have to struggle much more than children to learn a new language? Functional magnetic resonance (fMRI) experiments prove that first and later learned language are stored differently in the brain (see Kim, K. H. S., Relkin, N. R., Lee, K.-M., & Hirsch, J. (1997). Distinct cortical areas associated with native and second languages. Nature, 388, 171–174. I have shared this article on http://bit.ly/wRJHIt).

I agree that adults have better metacognitive abilities, since they have already acquired hypothetical deductive reasoning, but I disagree that this represents a greater potential. As adults, language learning comes less naturally precisely because your metacognitive abilities make you conscious about your own learning. If adults had “greater potential in L2 acquisition” than children, then they would learn languages easier than children, when in fact, is the other way round (in most cases). Adults have “greater metacognitive abilities”, which paradoxically, make them less proficient.

I see the concept of creating “flexible identities” as a valuable aid in language learning, but I don’t think it can recreate the way you learn your first language/s. Maybe you’re referring more to a “social” or “psychological” blockage rather than a biological-emotional blockage, which I think is the main constraint. I would love to experience that kind of diminishment in emotional blockage with English. I love English, have traveled, studied and worked in England, the United States, and have “opened” myself culturally a lot. However, no matter how many times I say “Hello”, it does not have the same “emotional resonance” as “Hola”, irrespectively of how much I try to “be flexible”. I would pay a lot to get to that point. It’s frustrating when you’re speaking with your “best English” and somebody asks you if you’re from Peru.

Think about the following. When you speak Spanish, do you make the same mistakes a Spanish speaker does or do you make the mistakes that an English speaker does? Do you use ser and estar correctly all the time? Unless you acquired Spanish during childhood, I think Spanish is a learned, not an acquired language for you, and the source of your mistakes is due to the fact that you’re using your metacognitive abilities much more than your emotions when speaking Spanish.

Fearchar MacIllFhinnein • Are the “acting abilities” referred to by Elizabeth (in reference to other comments) and the “fluid abilities” referred to by Manuel (from Cavanaugh) not the same? That would suggest to me that perhaps “fluidity” is like being physically supple: most people become less supple when they get older, but given the right approach to exercise, everyone can actually be very supple, even at an advanced age.

In other words, it may be that in the general population learning attainments can be correlated with age, but the age (or, if you prefer, its associated psychological and physiological factors) is not the cause, but rather the accumulated bad habits, which Elizabeth and Manuel have suggested, if I’m not misrepresenting you both, begin with learning the first language. I would question whether those bad habits are a necessary consequence of learning the initial language(s), or indeed of any other learning.

There is a theory that as we grow older we adopt bad habits physically, perhaps due to former injuries, and that they accumulate until in the end we are full of aches and pains with no obvious immediate cause. Has Cavanaugh assumed that people lose ability as they get older, when in fact people are adopting anti-learning habits – of which they garner more as time goes on? As we know, people cling to bad habits for emotional reasons. (Try persuading a smoker to give up!)

However, the ability to apply anti-learning strategies can even be an asset when learning. Many years ago, as a young adult, I spent a year in Germany. I spoke less and less English (my first language) during that year. (The first time that I had to use English seriously was on the ferry back to the UK, when I had to ask the Purser some question or other. I spoke to him, and marvelled at this idiot spouting English words in a German word order. The idiot was, of course, myself.) In order to learn German as effectively as possible, I had been suppressing English as much as possible. It didn’t take long to get back into the swing of things in English.

Perhaps controlling one’s own patterns of behaviour is the ultimate key to successful learning. Thinking of Manuel’s crystals and fluidity, is the perfect medium not liquid crystals? You are almost certainly reading these words on a display made of them. :-)

Tim Keeley • Elizabeth, I would like to respond to your statement and question: “Kuhl has demonstrated that by 10 months infants have developed neural networks for their native language that interfere with their ability to distinguish other languages.”

As for Kuhl’s observations, I am not sure what is meant by “interfere with their ability to distinguish other languages”. Could you please elaborate?

Anyhow, observations of the maturation process must deal simultaneously with the development process of linguistic competence and general cognitive development – the two are inseparable since the formation and manipulation of semantic categories are inseparable from the formation and manipulation of cognitive categories. As one matures the natural tendency is for the sophistication of both of these systems to increase in complexity with the increase of input from experiences that require labeling/categorization and an increased competence in creating connections between them.

Though, as I mentioned I am not sure of the intended interpretation of Khul’s observations, whatever the interpretation is, the observations would not necessarily confirm any insurmountable related neurolinguistics constraints after the maturation process (adult learners).

As for your question: “Why do you find it hard to believe that children are programmed for language acquisition and that their brains focus on mastery of other tasks as they age, with the result that language learning becomes more difficult? It seems so logical to me.”

I guess you mean language learning in terms of additional language learning. Anyhow I do not see a logical connection to any argument that would support the critical hypothesis in terms of additional language acquisition (or SLA if you prefer). If children are programmed for language learning does that mean the programming stops to function once one language is acquired? If you believe that a brain focusing on mastery of other tasks makes language learning more difficult does it imply that the development of the monolingual language system is retarded in the process?

Tim Keeley • Thank you for your input Manuel, I will address your comments in the order they were given.

Why do adults struggle more than children? One very important reason is that they have more fixed identities and more investment in those identities than children do – the emotional attachment is much greater. Any observations that show additional languages are stored in the brain in a manner different from L1 does not necessarily imply any constraints on L2 … LX acquisition. I just read the article you referred to and did not see any claims of physiological constraints in L2 … LX acquisition. If I missed them please point them out.

Yes I said adults have “greater potential” and the majority of adults do not use or develop this potential. So since you are talking about the majority of adults then the observation that children learn faster than adults does not refute the original statement. Greater metalinguistic and matacognitive abilities are only counterproductive when they are allowed to interfere instead of facilitate performance.

It is interesting to note that in Spain you can find children and adults who say they do not understand Catalan. On the other hand, I had no problem understanding the lyrics to Raimon’s songs in Catalan the first time I heard them due to my knowledge of Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian. The knowledge of these cognate languages provides the raw materials and the metalinguistic knowledge assists in pattern recognition of lexical mutations of words. Being able to do it on the fly is a matter of linguistic and cognitive development facilitated by metacognitive awareness – becoming aware how you think – your emotions – what contributes to maximum performance.

Fearchar MacIllFhinnein • Elizabeth, is your suggestion not a variant on the “pint pot theory” of language learning – the idea that once the mental “pot” is full, then to add more knowledge, other knowledge has to be poured out?

Tim Keeley • Yes Fearchar, I believe it to be so. Elizabeth, please do not take offense in regards to this comment but I even found the same attitude in the case of a neuroscientist at at a conference of the “Association of Cross-Cultural Psychology”. She felt that my learning a new language every year would preclude being able to store other knowledge!!! I find the more languages I learn the stronger my cognitive capabilities as well as my general recall capabilities.

Elizabeth Marcus • To answer Tim’s question about Kuhl. During her talk (the link to which was sent by Manuel), she shows films of babies distinguishing between sounds of all languages up to about the ages of 6 months. But by 10 months, many of them cannot hear the distinctions between sounds not in their native tongues. For example, Japanese babies can hear the difference between r and l as well as American babies but by 10 months no longer hear them as different (since the two sounds do not occur in Japanese). Previously, it was thought that something changed in the baby cortex, but Kuhl’s technology leads to the conclusion that it is that the baby is creating neural networks committed to its native language, to the sounds it repeatedly hears, and that that commitment creates interference in the ability to distinguish the particular sounds of other languages. If exposed to 12 session of 25 mins. of Mandarin by 4 different Taiwanese grad students, 9 month old babies can hear sounds unique to Mandarin as well as Taiwanese babies can. At the end of the talk Kuhl shows a movie to demonstrate the way our sight impacts our hearing. The clip shows a woman mouthing the sound “ga-ga” to a sound track that is saying “ba-ba.” Unless you close your eyes, you hear “ga-ga.” All this indicates the complexities of neuro-functioning in language learning and the extent to which we are learning how it all works. By the way, Kuhl’s lab is studying the application to adult learners of what they are learning about early language acquisition
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To summarize, Kuhl is not saying that babies lose the ability to learn a second language at 10 months, just that the brain, in organizing around the native language, is simultaneously losing its innate ability to distinguish one foreign language from another. In fact her Mandarin experiment show how little it takes to get the baby to build neural networks around a second language. She uses a chart that shows that the baby brain remains primed for L2 until the age of about six, that that ability diminishes until puberty, when it starts to decline at a sharper rate until adulthood, at which point it becomes poor (for most though not all, of course — you and Fearchar and Emerald are the proof of that). Unfortunately the talk does not concern the chart itself, which is what you dismiss and what I assume to be true. Hopefully, the brain scanners she demonstrates in the talk will answer many questions.

You ask: “If you believe that a brain focusing on mastery of other tasks makes language learning more difficult does it imply that the development of the monolingual language system is retarded in the process?” I don’t see at all why that would be the case, in fact, just the reverse. We need language for all kinds of thinking. As our thinking becomes more complex, so does our language and vice-versa. It just seems to me that we get better and bettter at what we practice — and worse at what we don’t You learn new languages repeatedly and, I assume, have learned how to do that efficiently and quickly (i.e., you’ve built neural patheways around language acquisition). Whereas, people who are monolingual and haven’t tried to learn a language since childhood haven’t developed their abilites in that arena and don’t have those neural pathways. Learning changes the brain. Eric Kandel was quoted in the NY Times on Tuesday as saying, “long-term memory alters the expression of of genes in nerve cells, which is the cause of the growth of new synaptic connections. [His expereiments have shown that] the brain can change because of experience. It gives you a different feeling about how nature and nurture interact. They are not separate processes.”

I think where we part ways is that I am inclined to believe that the brain loses its priming for L2 learning over time unless activated (with some on-going consistency) — while you do not. Perhaps we are both responding to personal experience and looking for science to prove us right.

Elizabeth Marcus • Fearchar, I do NOT believe that the brain is a pot that will only hold so much! All I meant was that if you only use one (or two) language(s) for most of your life and spend your energy acquiring other kinds of skills, you don’t build neural pathways for language-acquisition — so it gets harder. You mentioned the idea of language ability atrophying, which you do not believe happens, but I suppose I am coming to believe that as well. I appreciate your optimism that my disappointment with Japanese may be the fault of the wrong technique for learning it, but I am not hopeful. Let me describe my efforts.

When my children were 3 and 4 (and I was in my 30s) I arranged to exchange houses for the summer with an American family living in Tokyo. In preparation I took up Japanese cooking, served only Japanese dinners to my family, and studied Japanese one night a week. The exchange fell through and I dropped the Japanese, thinking I would have no way to use it. Twenty-five years later I decided to celebrate my 60th birthday by fulfilling the dream of learning Japanese — and proving to myself that aging did not mean the loss of mental abilities. I started with Rosetta Stone, which I supplemented with twice a week one-on-one with a Japanese speaker, since the aural part does not work on RS. Once I realized that the whole program doesn’t work (I succeed with the program while failing to actually learn anything) I switched to Pimsleur tapes which I did an hour a day. This helped my listening skills and my pronunciation but didn’t give me an opportunity to speak, so I began Japanese classes two nights a week. I continued with the Pimsleur and did the homework for my classes, devoting about an hour a day, 5 days a week to the task — for two years. I watch movies on the tread mill every morning, so I began watching Japanese movies, once with the subtitles, once without — but I never was able to understand the Japanese. In fact, I found it all incredibly difficult. I worked at the kana whenever I had a moment –in the subway, for instance– but I could not remember them without mnemonics — they never became automatic. I am an architect and am very visual, but I could not commit the kana to memory. Which brings me to a key aspect of language learning that we have not mentioned: memory! One’s memory gets worse with age, usually after 50, so I assume this is a major factor.

After two years of considerable –and varied– effort, I knew some phrases, but once beyond those few phrases I was still unable to hear Japanese as anything but gibberish. If there are other techniques for learning Japanese, I’d be delighted to hear about them, but I think I have given the task a good shot.

Manuel Aicart • Elizabeth, what happens to you is what most people experience, irrespectively of our discussions here. How come there are so many language schools, language teachers and so many different teaching methods? I won’t say that your struggle with Japanese is because you haven’t developed your full potential or haven’t invested enough time. If anybody could learn a language through the creation of “flexible identities”, that would mean the decline of the whole language learning industry as we understand it today.

With the appropriate training, people would create flexible identities and would learn whatever language in a natural way, just like children do. Having said that, I’m delighted to keep on hearing about it. At this point I feel that the more we write the more we fall into the “confirmation bias” (the tendency to search for or interpret information in a way that confirms one’s preconceptions). Have you read Kida’s book “Don’t Believe Everything You Think” (http://amzn.to/a1AFw)? Among other things he says that “We seek to confirm, not to question, our ideas.”

Tim, I agree with you, your learning languages does not preclude you from learning how to ride a bike or improving your mah jong technique. I thought you had been playing tennis, until I googled “mah jong” :)

I’m bilingual in Spanish and Catalan. In my region we find ourselves continually shifting from one language to the other. When I do it I don’t feel I’m shifting “identities”, but “languages”. Saying that I shift identities reminds me of linguistic relativism, and I think we’re past that. Shifting between Spanish and Catalan comes natural to me, something which does not happen with later learned languages (English, French, German), irrespectively of the time I’ve invested and how much I try to identify myself with them. So how come I or Elizabeth or so many motivated adults who invest time, etc.. do not seem to develop “the potential” you mention? What are we doing wrong? What about immigrants who have successfully integrated into new countries who can’t get rid of their original accents?

But let’s make this practical. Elizabeth is struggling with Japanese and I’m struggling with German. Without disclosing much information from your book, is there one exercise that we could practice to make our learning more “natural”, more “emotional”? Have you thought about the possibility of including one exercise after each chapter in your book so that people can practice? I think it would make it even more appealing.

Maybe if I’m able to create an English identity, people will stop asking me if I’m from Peru. Then they’ll ask me if I’m from Colombia!

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