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Recognition of subtle emotional cues may be developmental, according to neurological research. At the McLean Hospital in Belmont, Mass., Deborah Yurgelun-Todd and a group of researchers have studied how adolescents perceive emotion as compared to adults. The scientists looked at the brains of 18 children between the ages of 10 and 18 and compared them to 16 adults using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Both groups were shown pictures of adult faces and asked to identify the emotion on the faces. Using fMRI, the researchers could trace what part of the brain responded as subjects were asked to identify the expression depicted in the picture. The results surprised the researchers. The adults correctly identified the expression as fear. Yet the teens answered "shocked, surprised, angry." Moreover, teens and adults used different parts of their brains to process what they were feeling. The teens mostly used the amygdala, a small almond shaped region that guides instinctual or "gut" reactions, while the adults relied on the frontal cortex, which governs reason and planning. As the teens got older, however, the center of activity shifted more toward the frontal cortex and away from the cruder response of the amygdala. Yurgelun-Todd, director of neuropsychology and cognitive neuroimaging at McLean Hospital believes the study goes partway to understanding why the teenage years seem so emotionally turbulent. The teens seemed not only to be misreading the feelings on the adult's face, but they reacted strongly from an area deep inside the brain. The frontal cortex helped the adults distinguish fear from shock or surprise. Often called the executive or CEO of the brain, the frontal cortex gives adults the ability to distinguish a subtlety of expression: "Was this really fear or was it surprise or shock?" For the teens, this area wasn't fully operating.

Brain imaging studies have explored the neural mechanisms of recovery in adults following acquired disorders and, more recently, childhood developmental disorders. However, the neural systems underlying adult rehabilitation of neurobiologically based learning disabilities remain unexplored, despite their high incidence. Here we characterize the differences in brain activity during a phonological manipulation task before and after a behavioral intervention in adults with developmental dyslexia. Phonologically targeted training resulted in performance improvements in tutored compared to nontutored dyslexics, and these gains were associated with signal increases in bilateral parietal and right perisylvian cortices. Our findings demonstrate that behavioral changes in tutored dyslexic adults are associated with (1) increased activity in those left-hemisphere regions engaged by normal readers and (2) compensatory activity in the right perisylvian cortex. Hence, behavioral plasticity in adult developmental dyslexia involves two distinct neural mechanisms, each of which has previously been observed either for remediation of developmental or acquired reading disorders.

This article talks about a study that was conducted by MIT linguistics professors and a group from Carleton University that explored the phenomenon of why children mix up the words "and" and "or." Linguists say that children use almost entirely the same approach as adults when it comes to evaluating potentially ambiguous sentences, by testing and "strengthening" them into sentences with more precise meanings, when disjunction and conjunction ("or" and "and") are involved. However, they found that children do not test how a sentence would change if "and" was directly substituted for "or." On the other hand, adults compute "scalar implicatures," which is a technical phrase for thinking about the implications of the logical relationship between a sentence and its alternative. The research team conducted the study's experiment by testing 59 English-speaking children and 26 adults. The children ranged in age from 4 months to 6 years. The linguists gave the subjects a series of statements along with pictures, and asked them to say whether the statements were true or false. The results suggest that children are computing scalar implicatures when they evaluate the statements, but they largely do not substitute disjunctions and conjunctions when testing out the possible meaning of sentences, as adults do. In general, the researchers observed, across languages, and for children and adults alike, when you take 'and' out of the space of alternatives, "or" becomes "and."

"[New research] is suggesting that atypical brain function is a fundamental aspect of speech production tasks for adults who stutter. ... "Now because many speech areas are interconnected across the two hemispheres through the corpus callosum, it might suggest that hemispheric dominance for speech and language has not been established to the same degree as it has been for normally fluent adults." ... Loucks then used functional magnetic resonance imaging of brain activity to study participants who stutter and found that even brief, simple speech tasks - such as producing a single word to name a picture - is associated with altered functional activity."

"Researchers showed children images and voices of a child and two adults, and asked, "Which adult will the child grow up to be?" Children were presented with a challenge: One adult matched the child's race, and one matched the child's language, but neither matched both. ... As would be expected, 9- and 10-year-old children chose the adult who matched the featured child's race. ... Five- and six-year-old English-speaking white children's responses were a bit more surprising: Most of those children chose the language match, even though this meant that the featured child would have needed to change race."

"Two vital parts of mentally organizing the world are classification, or the understanding that similar things belong in the same category; and induction, an educated guess about a thing's properties if it's in a certain category. ... 'For the last 30 to 40 years it has been believed that even for very young children, labels are category markers, as they are for adults,' explains psychologist Vladimir M. Sloutsky ... To test their hypothesis, the psychologists showed pictures of two imaginary creatures to preschoolers and college undergraduates. Both animals had a body, hands, feet, antennae, and a head. ... The difference arose when the head was a jalet's but [the] label was "flurp," or vice-versa. Then, most of the adults went with the label (we accept that a dolphin is a mammal, even though it looks and swims like a fish). The children relied on the head for identification. Regardless of its name, a thing with a jalet's head is a jalet." Link to the study (PDF): http://cogdev.cog.ohio-state.edu/Papers/2011/SD-VS-PsychScience.pdf

This article talks about why children are able to learn languages faster than an adult. It explains why a toddler is able to learn two languages at once while an adult may take years to learn one language. It also talks about how the brain works when a child learns another language.

Answer by David Bailey, CEO of Spotnight, on Quora. I've learned several foreign languages as an adult. I was able to learn French to conversation fluency in 17 days using the following techniques. Note that I had previously learned Spanish to fluency so this was not my first foreign language.

This was a study looking at the use of elderspeak in a referential communication task. The study was used to determine if young adults paired with older adults, who stimulated dementia or acted normally, would change their fluency, prosody, grammatical complexity, semantic content, or discourse.

A research paper analyzing the advantages and disadvantages of distance learning for upper education and adult learners.

The critical period hypothesis is one of the reasons that some adults are hesitant to take on learning their heritage language. The theory essentially argues that there's a biological window where language learning is the most automatic, somewhere between the age of 2 and puberty. This theory has entered our popular consciousness as a rule that you can't learn a second-language fluently when you're older. However, scientists disagree with this notion because although it will take more conscious effort, it is still possible to become fluent in another language past the "critical window." Specifically, second language acquisition becomes more difficult with age because it requires rewiring your brain to break certain habits that relate to language learning. For example, pronunciation and accent requires breaking habits related to the way you move your mouth to speak, making it more difficult to have native-level pronunciation as you grow older. Beyond neuroscience, though, research has shown that other factors, such as exposure and education influence language learning.

A new longitudinal study, led by Mary E. Brushe, a researcher at the Telethon Kids Institute at the University of Western Australia, gathered data from 220 families across South Australia, Western Australia and Queensland with children who were born in 2017. Once every six months until they turned 3, the children wore T-shirts or vests that held small digital language processors that automatically tracked their exposure to certain types of electronic noise, as well as language spoken by the child, the parent or another adult. The researchers were particularly interested in three measures of language: words spoken by an adult, child vocalizations and turns in the conversation. They modeled each measure separately and adjusted the results for age, sex and other factors, such as the mother's education level and the number of children at home. Researchers found that at almost all ages, increased screen time squelched conversation. When the children were 18 months old, each additional minute of screen time was associated with 1.3 fewer child vocalizations, for example, and when they were 2 years old, an additional minute was associated with 0.4 fewer turns in conversation. The strongest negative associations emerged when the children were 3 years old - and were exposed to an average of 2 hours 52 minutes of screen time daily. At this age, just one additional minute of screen time was associated with 6.6 fewer adult words, 4.9 fewer child vocalizations and 1.1 fewer turns in conversation.

This article provides information about the motivation, means, and methods of text messaging in young adults (11-21 years old).

Some adults learn a second language better than others, and their secret may involve the rhythms of activity in their brains. New findings by scientists at the University of Washington demonstrate that a five-minute measurement of resting-state brain activity predicted how quickly adults learned a second language.

"Teenagers are more susceptible to developing disorders like addiction and depression ... "The brain region traditionally associated with reward and motivation, called the nucleus accumbens, was activated similarly in adults and adolescents," said Moghaddam. "But the unique sensitivity of adolescent DS to reward anticipation indicates that, in this age group, reward can tap directly into a brain region that is critical for learning and habit formation." ... not only is reward expectancy processed differently in an adolescent brain, but also it can affect brain regions directly responsible for decision-making and action selection. ... "Adolescence is a time when the symptoms of most mental illnesses-such as schizophrenia and bipolar and eating disorders-are first manifested, so we believe that this is a critical period for preventing these illnesses," Moghaddam said."

A new Northwestern University study shows the power of language in infants' ability to understand the intentions of others. The results, based on two experiments, show that introducing a novel word for the impending novel event had a powerful effect on the infants' tendency to imitate the behavior. Infants were more likely to imitate behavior, however unconventional, if it had been named, than if it remained unnamed, the study shows. Sandra Waxman, co-author of the study, states, "This is the first demonstration of how infants' keen observational skills, when augmented by human language, heighten their acuity for 'reading' the underlying intentions of their 'tutors' (adults) and foster infants' imitation of adults' actions."

Although it has a genetic component, most believe perfect pitch - or absolute pitch - is a primarily a function of early life exposure and training in music, says Takao Hensch, professor of molecular and cellular biology at Harvard. Hensch is studying valprioc acid, a drug which might allow adults to learn perfect pitch by re-creating this critical period in brain development. "It's a mood-stabilizing drug, but we found that it also restores the plasticity of the brain to a juvenile state," Hensch says. Valprioc acid allows the brain to absorb new information as easily as it did before age 7. Hensch's findings have potentially valuable implications for other critical-period-related developments, language being one. So the sci-fi question: in the future, can we come up with a way to reopen plasticity, [and] paired with the appropriate training, allow adult brains to become young again?

Pages 7-12 have some fascinating information regarding the brain's usage in multilingual children and adults.

"Few students are as lucky as Chris Bail [...] When I was about 11 or so, a group of kids threw stones at me, and that stuck in my head. That was just a big, big experience for me, and I guess I'm really lucky to have that because I know kids that are writing about, like, concerts they went to and stuff like that.'' I am disturbed greatly. What does not kill us will only make us stronger... Scary thought: Students trying to get into college will take extremes for more interesting topics to write about. What if it happens? Pressure. It exists. But don't let it RULE or RUIN your life.

I find it quite sad that students will go to the extremes and seek something that they think admissions officers will find intriguing rather than it coming from their gut and what is important to them. In my opinion the best advice I could give to someone writing their college essay is, be yourself. Don't try to be someone you're not.

"And though they seem to have more collaborators than ever before, from cooperative English teachers to new Web sites that offer successful essays for sale, the competition seems tougher than ever, now that so many early applicants have whittled the number of available slots." To me the college application is sounding more and more deceptive. By the time you take that raw essay written by purely yourself and it goes through multiple English teachers and websites, and other peers, it goes from your writing to like your teacher's writing. I feel that after all of the processes it goes through, all the people who review it, the finished product really doesn't show the college who YOU are.