While a young language learner can more easily acquire a native accent, adults retain the ability to learn new languages well into later life. Anyone can continue to learn and refine their vocabulary ...

A Calvin College professor of Spanish has earned a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to study language acquisition in Chile and Mexico City. “The ability to acquire language is innate ...

This chapter provides a broad overview of the findings from research on bilingualism and second-language learning, including types of bilingualism, linguistic aspects of second-language acquisition, ...

A new study reveals an often-overlooked process in language learning: children frequently begin by grasping whole phrases and only later identify the individual components within them. This ...

Children acquire language at an astounding speed: most produce their first word around their first birthday, and by 30 months of age, some can say as many as 600 words. Unfortunately, this is not the ...

Babies learn languages across cultures, under wildly different circumstances. Some children are spoken to in high-pitched, sing-song voices tailored just for them, while others grow up hearing adults ...

Recent research in orthography and second language (L2) speech processing has increasingly demonstrated that the written form of a language plays a pivotal role in shaping the way learners acquire and ...