Brittany Luce
👤 SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
No.
No, no, no.
It's not true.
You can learn a second language and become like what's called a sequential bilingual.
But this idea that you can only learn a language as a child has been kicking around for a long time.
And it bothered me.
Like I wanted to know, is it true?
And where did it come from?
And I traced it to something called
The Critical Period Hypothesis.
We reported it in a shortwave episode.
And it basically came out of the 50s and 60s and argues that there is this almost magical window for learning a second language that is somewhere between the age of two and puberty.
How much of that is actually true?
The part that's true is that there is a biological window where language learning is the most automatic.
It's just easier.
And that's because in the first three years of life, your brain is developing one million new neural connections per second.
Yeah.
According to researchers at the Center for the Developing Child at Harvard University.
Dang.
Okay.