Richard Roberts, Roger Kreuz.
Becoming Fluent: how cognitive science can help adults learn a foreign language.
MIT Press. 2015
Adults who want to learn a foreign language are often discouraged
because they believe they cannot acquire a language as easily as children.
In this book, Richard Roberts and Roger Kreuz draw on insights
from psychology and cognitive science to show that adults can master a foreign language
if they bring to bear the skills and knowledge they have honed over a lifetime.
Roberts and Kreuz report evidence that adults can learn new languages even more easily than children. Children appear to have only two advantages over adults in learning a language: they acquire a native accent more easily, and they do not suffer from self-defeating anxiety about learning a language. Adults, on the other hand, have the greater advantages—gained from experience—of an understanding of their own mental processes and knowing how to use language to do things. Roberts and Kreuz show how to leverage this metalinguistic ability in learning a new language.