Do you want to learn a language? Don't try so hard
The following is a Spanish translation of an interesting article published in the journal TIME about some brain processes that make it difficult for adults and make it easier for children to learn a new language.
"A new MIT study shows that doing more can actually make some aspects of learning a new language more difficult. Although researchers have known that adults have more difficulty with new languages than children, the latest findings, published in the journal PLOS ONE, suggest that the best cognitive abilities of adults are actually the ones that can cause them to stumble.
Children have a "sensitive period" for learning new languages that lasts until puberty, and during these years, certain parts of the brain are more developed than others. For example, they are experts in procedural memory, which study author Amy Finn, of MIT's McGovern Institute for Brain Research, describes as the "memory system we get for free. He is involved in tasks that we learn unconsciously, such as bicycling, dancing, or subtle linguistic rules. It is a system that learns from observation and experience; neural circuits in the brain construct a set of rules for the construction of words and sentences by absorbing and analyzing information-like the sounds-of the world around them.
A young child's procedural memory is in its own place and working well, and it doesn't interact with other brain functions," Finn says. However, with age, another memory system that is not so much based on the processes of exploration begins to mature, and control the process of learning languages. "As an adult, you have really useful late-development memory systems that assume and do everything."
In essence, adults can over-analyze new rules of language or sounds and try to make them fit into an understandable, coherent pattern that makes sense to them. But a new language may involve grammatical rules that are not so easily explained, and adults have more difficulty overcoming obstacles than children, who simply absorb the rules or exceptions and learn from them. That is especially true with pronunciation, since the way of making sounds is something that is established early in life, and becomes second nature.
"Adults are much better at choosing things that will help them right away like words and things that will help you get around a supermarket," says Finn. "As an adult, you can learn a language functionally, but it will never sound like a native speaker."
So how can adults remove their own obstacles to learning new languages? Finn says more research is needed to determine if adults could relearn like children, but linguists are looking at a variety of options. Some include "turning off" certain areas of the brain using a medication or a technique called transcranial magnetic stimulation, which may allow adults to be more open to accepting new rules of speech and sound.
Finn also hopes to be able to study adults who perform a difficult task while learning a language, since it's another way to distract the cognitive parts of the brain from focusing on the new language, to see if that can help absorb more linguistic information.
TIME Magazine