The ability to objectively quantify the complexity of a text can be a useful indicator of how likely learners of a given level will comprehend it. Before creating more complex models of assessing text difficulty, the basic building block of a text consists of words and, inherently, its overall difficulty is greatly influenced by the complexity of…

The acquisition of new skills over a life span is a remarkable human ability. This ability, however, is constrained by age of acquisition (AoA); that is, the age at which learning occurs significantly affects the outcome. This is most clearly reflected in domains such as language, music, and athletics. This article provides a perspective on the…

Two experiments in which participants named pictured objects with difficult or easier names, and a reanalysis and review of published data, reveal that problematic measures used in previous studies obscured the implications of group differences in tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) rates. In Experiment 1, increased age led to more TOTs for difficult but not…

This article provides a selective overview of theoretical issues and empirical findings relating to the question of age and second language acquisition (L2A). Both behavioral and brain-based data are discussed in the contexts of neurocognitive aging and cognitive neurofunction in the mature individual. Moving beyond the classical notion of…

In this paper we discuss recent neuroimaging evidence on three issues: (1) whether the same "language" areas are used to process a second language (L2) as the first language (L1) (2) the extent to which this depends on age of acquisition and (3) to the extent that the same areas of the brain are used, are they used in the same way? The results…

Discusses and explains the conditions under which first language transfer occurs in terms of the connectionist framework of second language representation, processing, and acquisition. Identifies these conditions as interlingual mapping, markedness, language distance, learner characteristics, cognitive load and sociolinguistic context. (104…