Can Mimicking Infants’ Early Experience Facilitate Adult Learning? A Critique of Hudson Kam (2017)

ABSTRACT

Why do adults seem to struggle more than children in learning a second language, despite being better at a range of other cognitive skills? The source of L1-L2 differences in language learning is one of the most debated topics in the study of language. One hypothesis is that L1-L2 differences are primarily experience-based, with language learning abilities themselves showing a high degree of plasticity. Hudson-Kam (2018) recently presented findings that seem to go against this hypothesis: in five studies, adults failed to show better learning in a more infant-like environment. In this article, I offer a theoretical and empirical critique of these findings and outline some open questions for investigating experience-based explanations for L1-L2 differences. In short, the main critique has to do with how we define what infant-like (or child-like) learning is and how we identify which aspects of children’s experience facilitate which aspects of language learning.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Dr. Jenny Culberston for helpful and insightful comments on the manuscript as well as the Israeli Science Foundation for funding (grant 584-16).

Notes

¹ Interestingly, both factors may lead to higher overall learning accuracy in Hudson Kam’s language compared to previous studies: phonological cues assist adults’ learning of noun classes (e.g., Brooks et al., 1993) and suffixes are claimed to be learned better (Ramscar et al., 2010). However, this is orthogonal to the impact of learning environment on accuracy. Having a more child-like environment should still lead to higher accuracy compared to having a less child-like one.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Israel Science Foundation [584-16],