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Home/ Words R Us/ MIT Scientists prove adults learn language to fluency nearly as well as children - Medium
jamie shimamoto

MIT Scientists prove adults learn language to fluency nearly as well as children - Medium - 2 views

SLA second language acquisition fluency adults children foreign language

started by jamie shimamoto on 05 Sep 18
  • jamie shimamoto
     
    This article discusses the often assumed theory that children who learn a foreign language before they are 10 are more likely to master it than those who learn the new language as adults. MIT scientists have found through a study that although it is indeed beneficial to start learning a foreign language earlier, there is a large number of adults who outperformed native speakers. When given the same amount of time, the top 25% of people who learned the language when they were over 20 do just as well as the average person who started before they were 10.
  • Lara Cowell
     
    For some reason, the URL for this article got lost: itʻs
    https://medium.com/@chacon/mit-scientists-prove-adults-learn-language-to-fluency-nearly-as-well-as-children-1de888d1d45f

    While the findings of this Hartshorne, et al. (2018) study are encouraging, in that researchers found that the cut-off age for learning second language (L2) grammar at native-like levels seemed to be older than previously thought (17.4 years of age vs. puberty), the researchers only examined grammar acquisition, but not phonology/pronunciation, an aspect of language learning thatʻs crucial to full fluency.

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