Recent studies have suggested that language aptitude is a domain-general and flexible trait to acquire foreign languages, regarding various cognitive abilities such as memory systems as its crucial components. Despite a growing interest in working memory, however, much remains unknown about the impact of associative memory on language aptitude.…

Few adult second language (L2) learners successfully attain high-level proficiency. Although decades of research on beginning to intermediate stages of L2 learning have identified a number of predictors of the rate of acquisition, little research has examined factors relevant to predicting very high levels of L2 proficiency. The current study,…

This article reports on a study on learning new and relearning forgotten words of French as a foreign language in young (mean age 22.4), middle-aged (mean age 50.3), and elderly speakers (mean age 76.0). The three age groups performed similarly on relearning old words, but the younger learners were significantly better at learning new words. Data…