Why do older people struggle to learn new languages?
Older people often find it difficult to learn a new language; is this primarily due to biological aging, or are other factors also at play? We spoke to Professor Ocke-Schwen Bohn about his research on perceptual flexibility among older people, and whether they still retain the capacity to learn aspects of a new language well into their retirement.
Our everyday experience suggests that it becomes more difficult to learn a new language as we grow older, with the children of immigrants often gaining fluency fairly quickly for example, while their parents tend to struggle for longer. While this has commonly been believed to be due to changes in the brain as we age, evidence suggests brain plasticity doesn’t actually decline over time as much as had previously been thought, and now Professor Ocke-Schwen Bohn aims to build a fuller picture of this topic in an Independent Research Fund Denmark (DFF)backed research project. “We are working on the question of whether difficulties in picking up a new language are primarily due to biological aging, or whether other factors are also at play,” he outlines. The project team is working with Danish adults between the ages of 60-75 with relatively limited fluency in foreign languages, who have been recruited from the local community. “These are healthy, active people. We aim to investigate whether chronological age prevents this group from learning a new language,” explains Professor Bohn.
Identification training
This research is centered specifically on the ability to learn the phonetic aspects of a language, meaning the perception and production of speech sounds. The project participants are all native speakers of Danish, which has a very rich vowel inventory, and researchers are looking at their ability to learn and identify sounds not found in Danish, such as the contrast between ‘s’ and ‘z’ (Danish has no ‘z’ sound), or the four tones of Mandarin Chinese (where a syllable like ‘ma’ has quite different meanings depending on the pitch contour with which it is produced).
“We’re doing auditory perceptual training, where participants hear a sound and click on the button that they believe corresponds to the sound. If they press the incorrect button it turns red and the sound is played again. We held ten 15 minute sessions over a three week period,” says Professor Bohn. The results of this cohort were contrasted with a control group who didn’t participate, and researchers have found that this training did
indeed help people to distinguish between unfamiliar sounds.
A further strand of research in the project involves looking at peoples’ pronunciation of what are called minimal pairs, words which sound similar but have distinct meanings, such as ‘peace’ and ‘peas’, or ‘sue’ and ‘zoo’.
This allows researchers to probe the ability of older people to not only distinguish between different sounds, but also produce them in their own speech. “Can people also produce these differences?” asks Professor Bohn. A lot of research in this area has previously focused on younger people, now Professor Bohn aims to draw comparisons with these earlier results.
“It’s previously been found that training regimes can help people to differentiate between sounds, but we only have evidence on this up to the age of about 30,” he outlines. “We know that the linguistic system can be reorganised up to the age of about 30, now we want to find out whether this is in fact possible in older people as well. We don’t really know what happens as you get older in this respect.”
The project team is working to build a fuller picture in this area, with researchers probing whether chronological age prevents people from learning certain aspects of a language. While it might be hypothesised that seniors take more time to learn a subject than younger people, Professor Bohn says that in fact the evidence suggests otherwise. “The training trajectory for juniors and seniors is nearly identical for the first sound contrast that we looked at,” he says. This finding holds
people still retain the ability to absorb new information and are not automatically on a path of irreversible cognitive decline. “We want to say to older people that they can still learn new things,” he stresses. While the project’s research has focused primarily on phonetics, Professor Bohn believes that seniors could also learn other aspects of language. “We can reasonably expect that other things are also learnable for seniors, beyond phonetics,” he says.
“We are working on the question of whether difficulties in picking up a new language are primarily due to biological aging, or whether other factors are also at play.”
wider importance in the context of our ageing population, and the issue of how people can continue to live fulfilling, active and independent lives well into their retirement.
“There are many healthy seniors who remain active beyond 70. They are curious, they want to learn something new, and they have the time to do it,” continues Professor Bohn.
“The results from our project so far show us that we can encourage older people to learn new languages. It can be done, age does not prevent that.”
Language learning
Many of the different things that we learn on an everyday basis are essentially the result of repeated exposure, which helps embed them in our own mental landscape. This is particularly true of language learning, and Professor Bohn says the project’s findings so far show that older
PERCEPTUAL FLEXIBILITY
Perceptual Flexibility in Old Age: Effect of Training on Speech Perception
Project Objectives
The project team is investigating whether the increased difficulty older people experience in learning a new language is caused by age-related changes in the brain, or whether other factors are involved.
Researchers are investigating the ability of older Danish people to learn the speech sounds are not used in their native language.
Project Funding
Research supported by a grant from the Independent Research Fund Denmark.
Contact Details
Principal Investigator,
Prof. Dr. Ocke-Schwen Bohn
Professor of English Linguistics
Department of English, Aarhus University DK-8000 Aarhus C, Denmark
T: +45 20992083
E: ocke.bohn@cc.au.dk
W: https://cc.au.dk/en/phonetic-flexibilityin-old-age
W: https://ebooks.au.dk/aul/catalog/ book/322
The project’s research is ongoing, with Professor Bohn and his colleagues still looking to dig deeper into questions around perceptual flexibility in older people. So far two studies have been completed, one on identifying ‘s’ and ‘z’ and another on tone training, while a further study on audio-visual training is set to begin soon. “Many speech sounds contain not just auditory information, but also visual information, which is a topic of great interest in the project,” explains Professor Bohn. For instance, the first sound in ‘thin’ and in ‘fin’ are auditorily very similar, but visually quite distinct. “There is a student in our group who is very interested in what this does to people with hearing problems, when you train them visually on speech sounds,” continues Professor Bohn. “My hope is that this research will continue into the future, as there is a lot of interest in this work, particularly in the context of healthy aging.”
