Language acquisition is a multi-factorial, multi-dimensional and multi-stratal phenomenon. If you focus on one aspect, the approach is at the expense of excluding other aspects. A big question as is asked entails a vast reply, the whole scholars in the universe are trying to answer just a portion of what is considered as the most complicated faculty of human species_language. Don't dismay. Btw, plasticity is sth that belongs to pre-puberty. After puberty it is claimed that the plasticity vanishes. Man is stuck in a hard shell rather than a flexible all-absorbing ability. They can master lexico-grammar and also discoursal aspects yet for people after puberty acquiring native-like pronunciation is claimed to be very hard, out of reach or impossible. Notions and factors such as the individual psychology, neurology, physiology, internal motivation; social , cultural, historical factors; power distribution; class, age, gender, ethnicity; natural vs classroom environment, authenticity real life example vs artificial classroom exposure, learning styles and learning strategies; input, intake, and output and still a longer list of factors all have an impact on SLA. We are all on the route to know just part of the system or mechanism , yet there is no conclusive answer. We can easily pose a very short question such as "What is the treatment for cancer?" but the answer is neither conclusive, nor utterable. It involves a huge pile of information concerning numerous factors inspected through various perspectives, "signifying nothing." Yet, as human beings we try to quench our curiosity. In this activity, we are fortunate enough to have a collective curiosity; that is, all the thinkers in applied linguistics collectively try to find a way to better understand SLA. From antiquity, Plato, and Aristotle , to F Saussure, Chomsky, Hymes, Halliday, Gass, Ellis, and many other important scholars they have tried to grasp some aspect of SLA and expand human knowledge on the quest for language learning /acquisition. ... you see, this is not yet finished.

Best wishes. Dr Babak Majidzadeh (PhD)

Dear Flora,

Interesting question, thank you! I'll try to answer it based on the neurolinguistics research studies, which is my field. I would definitely leave out the term "talent", as the discussion may touch areas with which I am not very familiar.

Neurolinguistics studies show that neural circuits and strategies used by learners for their first language have a strong impact on the way the second language is achieved. Things slightly change for native/early bilinguals, as well as specific cultural, social and motivation aspects for a certain category of learners. In other words, it's easy for most Germans to learn English, and so is for Italians to learn Spanish, but specific circumstances allow a, let's say native Dutch speaker, to become an excellent Japanese or Chinese speaker. Mind you, neurobiology will always be there to keep an eye on neural architecture, and Brain Imaging studies can show how first language modifies the process of acquisition of the second. But neuroplasticity works wonder!

I would assume learning languages that are closer to your mother language are easier to learn. If L1 and L2 have similar grammar rules, word order, stem from the same language family (for instance Latin or Germanic), are written with the same alphabet (for instance Latin alphabet or Chinese characters), then L2 would be easier to learn. More factors may be present but this is just from the top of my mind. I am not specialised in L2 learning so if anyone wants to correct me, feel free!

Dear Christina, Thank you very much for your very useful interesting answer!

Hi, Lonneke Lonneke Janssen , 100% correct there! :)

Just wished to add, Flora Flora Komlosi-Ferdinand , if you're interested I can provide research details, so you can get more information.

And no, "being unable to learn" another language is totally out of the question. Persons unable to learn languages are unable to learn in general, as in cognitive deficit, specific pathologies, etc.

Best,

Christina

Dear Christina, It would be great to have more details on this, thanks a lot! What has sparked my interest on this topic is my decade long experience with friends, colleagues and students, who were able to acquire certain languages having native-like proficiency, yet, even after studying for decades other languages they were not proficient. Why, for instance, an American can learn Thai perfectly, yet after 10 years of being motivated and exposed to Mongolian he was not able to have a simple conversation? Why a Hungarian speaker can learn Catalan in a year but no Kazakh at all? I am trying to move out of the mainstream idea of L1 affects L2 learning. How does neuroplasticity works within this domain? Thanks!

Dear Flora, I'll be delighted to answer your questions one by one, as soon as possible. I'm about to start teaching in a few minutes, let me get back and discuss about these interesting topics. Thanks for your trust and interest!

Thank you! Have a great day! :)

Hi Flora, I am not a neurolinguist, but I believe that learning languages takes more than neuroplasticity; the social and the biological interact when a person is learning a language.

I believe politics can influence language learning in both ways. Being from Ontario, where FSL (French as a Second Language) is a mandatory course, I have noticed that many students refuse to learn French but are very successful learning another language.

Language acquisition is a multi-factorial, multi-dimensional and multi-stratal phenomenon. If you focus on one aspect, the approach is at the expense of excluding other aspects. A big question as is asked entails a vast reply, the whole scholars in the universe are trying to answer just a portion of what is considered as the most complicated faculty of human species_language. Don't dismay. Btw, plasticity is sth that belongs to pre-puberty. After puberty it is claimed that the plasticity vanishes. Man is stuck in a hard shell rather than a flexible all-absorbing ability. They can master lexico-grammar and also discoursal aspects yet for people after puberty acquiring native-like pronunciation is claimed to be very hard, out of reach or impossible. Notions and factors such as the individual psychology, neurology, physiology, internal motivation; social , cultural, historical factors; power distribution; class, age, gender, ethnicity; natural vs classroom environment, authenticity real life example vs artificial classroom exposure, learning styles and learning strategies; input, intake, and output and still a longer list of factors all have an impact on SLA. We are all on the route to know just part of the system or mechanism , yet there is no conclusive answer. We can easily pose a very short question such as "What is the treatment for cancer?" but the answer is neither conclusive, nor utterable. It involves a huge pile of information concerning numerous factors inspected through various perspectives, "signifying nothing." Yet, as human beings we try to quench our curiosity. In this activity, we are fortunate enough to have a collective curiosity; that is, all the thinkers in applied linguistics collectively try to find a way to better understand SLA. From antiquity, Plato, and Aristotle , to F Saussure, Chomsky, Hymes, Halliday, Gass, Ellis, and many other important scholars they have tried to grasp some aspect of SLA and expand human knowledge on the quest for language learning /acquisition. ... you see, this is not yet finished.

Best wishes. Dr Babak Majidzadeh (PhD)

The question can be also approached from the (historical) perspective of psychological investigations into this issue, starting from the G-factor model (Spearman), and the S-factor model (Thurstone) about the structure of intelligence.

The role of abilities (and motivation) in language learning became the subject of investigations as long ago as the 1920s. There were two general views concerning the role of abilities. The adherents of the first one presume that there is a general ability to acquire languages, and it greatly varies from individual to individual; this ability enables people to acquire any language with the same ease or the same difficulty. Followers of the other view (that of Thurstone) claimed that the acquisition of various languages requires also various abilities, namely, a person can be successful when learning certain languages, and do less well when learning other languages. (It was Canadian psychologists -Lambert, Gardner-who investigated also the role of motivation in language learning, throwing some light on the components of this "elusive" concept. They especially stressed the significance of what is called the orientation index and the intensity of the motivation. The orientation index tells of the motives of language learning. Integrative oriented, more successful students learn the second language in order to get closer to those who speak that language (internally motivated), whereas of those less successful students of instrumental orientation language learning is simply an instrument of success (externally motivated). Intensity of language learning can be measured by the time invested into the learning. Another important role is the learner's attitude towards the speakers of the other language. Students with integrative orientation, strong motivation, and positive attitude towards the speakers – these are the components of the integrative motive – learn languages more successfully. Other elements of the integrative motive are the positive attitude to language learning of the learners’ parents, the positive attitude of the learners themselves to the teacher and the language as a school subject, a lower level of anxiety in language classes, less pronounced ethnocentric or autocratic attitude, and, in certain environments, dissatisfaction with one’s status within its own language group).

Nagyon köszönöm az értékes válaszát!

In my opinion, for the first question 'Can an individual have more ‘natural talent’ to learn only a certain second language or type of languages, yet being unable to learn others?', the answer is definitely YES. As it has been commented here, it is true that language proximity may have a role in this. It is (theoretically) easier for an English speaker to learn German than for a Chinese speaker, for example. Other people, however, may learn 'distant' languages perfectly. Exposure to the language and motivation are also main actors. Obviously, the more you like the language, the more you think it may be useful, the more you feel identified with that language, etc., the more possibilities you have to be successful in learning. However, sometimes none of these work. According to my research, there are many individuals who are (still) attempting to learn Cornish and after years are not able to say more than a few sentences. There are English-speaking people in Scotland who speak Spanish, French, etc... but cannot even understand Scots, which is very similar to English. The same Leon and in in Castile (Spain), people are unable to speak or/and understand Portuguese although they have learnt English.

Here is where we have to look for answers to the second question: 'Besides motivation, identification and/or exposure what other factors may enhance or hinder foreign language learning success?' and to be true... I am not sure. Why a Spaniard who speaks English cannot learn Italian (for example) even if he tries?

Well, one explanation may be that his brain notices that he can understand and being understood in his native language, so his learning capacity gets relaxed to the minimum necessary, therefore there is no improvement after a certain level. I have noticed people who speak the same [low] level the first year of studying a language than after ten years.

Another thing that comes to my mind is an inconscious rejection of the language, as if the brain said 'this is not what I thought'. The individual may keep on thinking that everything is alright but in his brain's deepest neurons, the project has been already abandoned.

Finally, my last idea is: we are humans. It means that we are impredictible. Wen in mathematics you have 2+2 it always equals 4. With humans, you have motivation+similar language+exposure+everything to succeed and the result is... well it depends on every person.

"Natural talent" would mean "biological" as far as I understand, and there is a problem in the question itself, though there may be differences in the phonatory physiology of populations. From what we know, the infant is from very early stages exposed to the melody and rythm of the linguistic environment, so as far as the baby is raised in a multilinguistic environment, he/she should be able to better adapt to a similar linguistic background, in Asia, students from countries around China are better fit in learning the tonal system than their Euro-american west Asiatic counterparts. The difficulties in learning languages are somehow linked with similarities and dissimilarities, the closer a language is the harder it might be for a speaker to make the necessary shifts to the closer language, and on the other hand the more distant one may seem absolutely impossible to adapt to, since so many things are to be learned rich morphology/poor or lacking morphology, syntactic rules, language categories, sounds (phonetical units and prosody, tone stress length) that seem strange or even offensive to one's ear, etc... semantic and social stratification of grammar and vocabulary, syntax and phonology) all these combined may deeply affect the ability of a learner in the process of acquiring the new languages. However, I do not think it is a "natural talent" in the sense of genetics, but much more an environmental question, linked with the "natural" talent for learning languages.

Yes, I think so and I think I am a clear example of this. I am Italian by origin and I had no problem learning French, Spanish and Portuguese because, I believe, I could always use intuition to learn these other languages. On the contrary I have always had problems to internalize my knowledge of English because the way of organizing the speech is completely different from that of the Romance languages. The structure of the Germanic languages is more rigid than that of the Romance languages and, in English, I have the impression of never being able to say what I really think.

There are already some very good answers here. But an aspect of motivation which has not been mentioned, I think, can be found in the work of Martin Lamb, Zoltan Dornyei, Ema Ushioda, etc. The concern is how (younger) learners envisage their 'future selves'. A school learner is likely to learn another language more successfully and easily if they imagine that at some point in the future they will travel to the part of the world where that language is spoken and/or if they have an ambition to be a speaker of that language when they are older. (I am not a specialist in this field; see the work of the three writers mentioned above.)

Yes, of course. Some individuals have a great ability to acquire a particular language when they are exposed o it and yet they have no ability to acquire another language only after long practise and systematic learning strategies

With regard

Ro'ya Latef Talib

Thanks Ro'Ya!

Hi again, Flora

Please check my paper:

"Cortical organization for receptive language functions in Chinese, English, and Spanish: A cross-linguistic MEG study", 2004 Neuropsychologia 42(7):967-79 DOI: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2003.11.019. It will give you a hint about how different languages are organized in the brain, and how this organization contributes to easier or more difficult learning of a specific language. If you can't access the full text, let me know and I'll send it to you. I'll be back with more research.

Christina

Hi Christina,

Thank you very much for your help again! I have already sent the request for the full text of your article. Looking forward to read it!

Hi, Flora

Thanks for your interest. I've just sent you the full text requested, and I'm also preparing a list of papers which shed light on how neurobiology and neural architecture support the acquisition of different languages. There is no doubt that motivation, social and cultural context are strong factors when we talk about language learning, but neurolinguistic studies have greatly contributed to understanding how our brain works when in comes to learning a specific language rather than another one, and why some learners face difficulties for some but not for other languages.

Thank you very much again! I really appreciate your help!

Happy to help, Flora! Will get back with more papers ASAP.

I think it has something to do with Krashen's affective filter, as in there are as many filters as many languages you're learning, and if in one language the filter is low, in another it can be high. I also think this question goes beyond linguistics and is mainly related to cognitive- or neuropsychology. As an experienced language learner and teacher I've observed that these filters can be comprised of beliefs and attitudes not only towards the languages but also towards our own personal experiences closely linked with the language in question. For example, I wanted to learn Chinese but unfortunately I wasn't able to overcome the language barrier I developed because of a quite stressful and many times frustrating life in China (no offense please, it was just my subjective experience). Another instance was an adult immigrant living in the USA who wanted to improve his English as he believed locals couldn't understand him however he sounded really fluent and clear. Turned out, he had a very negative attitude towards the country, its people and he didn't like living there. So I'm almost sure with such a negative attitude he spoke in a way that actually impeded the communication with locals and it affected his language skills.

With that said, it appears that an individual's personal life experiences involving a foreign language play a great role in learning and later on in language production. I guess it resembles anchoring in a way, however I have not delved much into NLP.

Hi Svetlana,

Loved your answer! Btw... I am having a similar experience as yours in Mongolia. :) Also, I am actually arriving to the exact same conslusion as you did. Thank you very much!

Hi, Flora

Just wished to signal a very interesting, recent paper, published a few days ago. It underlies the fact that the processing of acoustic and phonological information in lexical tones is largely modulated by native language experience. Specifically, learners of Mandarin Chinese with tonal native language (Thai, Vietnamese) perform better than learners with non-tonal native language (Indonesian, Kyrgyz). The paper is "Effects of native language experience on Mandarin lexical tone processing in proficient second language learners" by Yu et al., Psychophysiology, July 2019. Being myself a proficient second learner of Mandarin Chinese, I find it extremely useful that research brings experimental proof for the mechanisms underlying second language acquisition. You can find the description of the respective mechanisms in my paper "Cortical...".

Christina, thank you again for your invaluable help! I read your article and found it fantastic! Your research sheds light on a number of very interesting questions.

Hi again, Flora

Check this very very recent paper by Fan Cao et al., "L1 reading experience influences L2 lexical learning: Spanish learning in Chinese speakers and English speakers", just published in Neuroscience. The data suggest an advantage for learning that uses handwriting over speech-based learning across all participants. In summary, it appears that handwriting facilitates lexical learning by enhancing orthographic involvement in Chinese speakers, while the handwriting condition enhances phonological involvement in English speakers. The opposite learning patterns that characterize Chinese and English learners of Spanish are due to different first language learning experience.

Dear Christina, thank you again for this interesting info! I rally appreciate all your help. All the material you have suggested so far is fantastic and it really shakes up some older thoughts on language learning!

Dear Flora, you're welcome! It's so nice to have colleagues involved in the wonderful world of neurolinguistics. Technology and interdisciplinarity allow us nowadays to access areas unknown in the past, and language organization in the brain is one of them. Mind you, I am a strong supporter of social and cultural factors that condition language learning, but our studies bring us ever closer to understanding how neural architecture and language background determine the way, the speed and the success of foreign/second language learning.