An adult can return to a state of effortless learning like a child.
From a guest an adult who speaks the language may wish that he or she had learned it as a child when learning something new was easy. But according to a recent study, you can also return to the search time for language learning as an adult.
Professor of Cognitive Science at the University of Helsinki Riikka Möttönen and his colleagues show that adults learn a foreign language better when the cognitive abilities typical of adults are suppressed from interference.
“Attenuation helped adults learn effortlessly and unconsciously, in the same way that children learn foreign languages,” says Möttönen.
Babies and young children pick up regularities and structures early on from the speech they hear around them. This is how they learn the language automatically and unnoticed.
As an adult, learning a foreign language is difficult again. According to Möttönen, this is kind of surprising because adults have more advanced cognitive abilities than children.
For adults the haven of typical cognitive abilities in the brain are the frontal lobes.
These take care of conscious thinking, deliberation, directing one’s own actions and planning for the future. Abilities and the areas of the brain that support them develop well into adulthood.
However, according to Möttönen, higher cognitive skills in adults interfere with language learning because they limit the mechanism of language learning that is characteristic of children.
“Mechanisms still exist in the adult brain, but late-onset functions limit their functioning,” says Möttönen.
The child’s better ability to learn languages than adults has also been explained by the fact that there are special periods of sensitivity in childhood that promote learning. When the periods are over, the ability to learn also fades.
However, the findings of Möttönen and his colleagues suggest that the child’s typical skill of learning has not been lost, at least not completely, as an adult.
In his experiments the researchers attenuated the anterior frontal function of adult subjects with magnetic stimulation of the brain before they listened to the byte flow of the artificial tongue.
“Subjects learn to better extract language structures and regularities from the sound stream. But they were not aware of their learning. The situation was similar to children who learn words and sentence structures without being aware. ”
The learning was also better in the second test set-up, where subjects performed tasks that required concentration before listening to the stream of syllables. Doing tasks tired higher cognitive abilities so that they did not interfere with language acquisition.
The latter concentration test seems to provide an indication of how learning could be promoted.
Actually however, it is not yet clear whether the discovery of his group could help language students.
“It would be quite possible to suppress the cognitive abilities inherent in adults by giving them tasks that require concentration and at the same time, for example, listening to a foreign language. It could improve automatic language learning. ”
In further research, Möttönen and partners intend to find out whether grammar and language rules can also be learned better by suppressing adult thinking.
The learning study was published by the U.S. Academy of Sciences Pnas Scientific Journal.
Read more: Talking to a child in a crib is not a pointless nonsense – it is an important exercise in the language
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