Brain signatures of artificial language processing: Evidence challenging the critical period hypothesis
- †Max Planck Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, PO Box 500 355, 04303 Leipzig, Germany; ¶Georgetown University, Department of Neuroscience, Brain and Language Lab, 3900 Reservoir Road, NW, Washington, DC 20007; and ‖Science and Computing, Hagellocher Weg 71, 72070 Tuebingen, Germany
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Communicated by Edward E. Smith, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI (received for review May 10, 2001)
Abstract
Adult second language learning seems to be more difficult and less efficient than first language acquisition during childhood. By using event-related brain potentials, we show that adults who learned a miniature artificial language display a similar real-time pattern of brain activation when processing this language as native speakers do when processing natural languages. Participants trained in the artificial language showed two event-related brain potential components taken to reflect early automatic and late controlled syntactic processes, whereas untrained participants did not. This result challenges the common view that late second language learners process language in a principally different way from native speakers. Our findings demonstrate that a small system of grammatical rules can be syntactically instantiated by the adult speaker in a way that strongly resembles native-speaker sentence processing.
Footnotes
Abbreviations
- L1,
- first language;
- L2,
- second language;
- ERP,
- event-related brain potential;
- TG,
- trained group;
- CG,
- control group
- Received May 10, 2001.
- Accepted November 15, 2001.
- Copyright © 2002, The National Academy of Sciences
