ABSTRACT
Carnegie Mellon University and the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition, Pittsburgh, USA
A principal observation in the study of language acquisition is that people exposed to a language as children are more likely to achieve fluency in that language than those first exposed to it as adults, giving rise to the popular notion of a critical period for language learning (Lenneberg, 1967; Long, 1990). This is perhaps surprising because children have been found to be inferior to adults in most tests of other cognitive abilities.
