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Originally Posted by steven
Unfortunately most of the material I've read on the subject of a 'cut-off' age, so to speak, for an L2 is pretty dated so I've never heard much about the neuroscience business.
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My neuro-psych books on the shelf and I can't be bothered to get it to give you the exact details, but basically after you hit 30 your brain is pretty much fully developed; myelination is complete in the hippocampus and the brain stops creating so many new neural pathways so easily. So it takes you longer and more effort to internalize completely 'alien' concepts. A 35 year old might pick up a new sport fairly easily, but the pathways for body-movement will already have been set, or learn to cook but they're already familiar with flavor and basic processes needed to absorb the cooking information (eg, visual measurement, ability to read cook books, manual dexterity, sense of hot/cold etc). You can easily build and improve old paths; whole new ones is what's difficult.
New languages, particularly ones that differ a lot from L1, seem to particularly require new neural-connections, so that's why people seem to slow down with their learning as they age. You can see it somewhat with computer/tech-use and the older generations. They don't take to it as fluidly for some reason as children, even if given the same amount of exposure. Language differs in that learners tend to fully internalize knowledge before they can physically produce it as well; it's not like say, surfing, where you can just get the 'feel' for it before you understand the technicalities of what you're actually doing.
And there's pretty strong evidence for a point of no return as well; children who are never exposed to language at all and reach pre-teen age pretty much never learn to speak with normal clarity or use grammar correctly. You get more broken word-strings of concepts; "girl chair cookie there want. girl fall. sad.", similar to certain aphasia's. If language learning was simply environmental, we wouldn't expect this to happen; they should still be able to learn, but sadly, it seems that there's some physical reason stopping them from absorbing language skills. So older people CAN learn a second language, because they have ~some~ of the pathways they need having learnt L1, but they'll struggle to be as fluent as quickly as younger people learning a second language. I guess one reason why this isn't more evident is that language teaching in schools is pretty artificial.