Second-language Learning and Changes in the Brain

xistences of a critical period for L2 learning which suggest that language learning is constrained by maturational factors and the effects of increasing experience with a first language (Kuhl 2004). Though both of them underlay a popular implication that a reduction in neural plasticity degrades the ability to learn and retain new linguistic information, there is little direct evidence to support it.

Our findings here are still too preliminary and insufficient to be completely valid, but they do provide us with new methods to make more detailed investigations, which will eventually tell us more useful about what would happen to the brain during L2 learning, and what roles would those changes play in L2 acquisition.

 

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