If at First You Don’t Succeed, Sit Back and Listen (Extract)

Few of us remember how easily we learned language as children. Although the acquisition wasn’t always graceful then — ‘awry’never sounds the same way aloud as the way I read it in my head — using our primary language as an adult is as habitual as tying shoelaces and seemingly as instinctual as smiling. Given how involuntarily we adults use our primary language, it’s shocking how difficult learning new languages as an adult can be. The authors of a recent PLOS ONE paper postulated that the very functions we develop as our brains mature as adults may be what hinder us from mastering language the way a child does. We might, in fact, be “trying” too hard.

Researchers have shown in previous studies that adults outperform children in tasks that require attentional focus and effort. This is because the regions of the brain associated with these abilities — the prefrontal and parietal cortices — develop more slowly, and as a result, these abilities become stronger as we age. In other words, adult brains develop abilities that help us “try harder.” These same capabilities may, however, interfere with our capacity to learn some aspects of language as adults, like the tricky networks that underlie grammar.