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Comment by nutanc | Hacker News Reader

This may be the reason why you can still learn programming even when you are 40 years old, but its very hard for you to learn a new language the older you get as you language acquisition skills fade away.

Also the experiment was "The researchers showed them snippets of code and asked them to predict what action the code would produce.".

This may not be the best way to prove the thesis conclusively. Because when I read code I check the syntax fast and then I try to figure out logic.

"The researchers saw little to no response to code in the language regions of the brain"

This may mean that the participants quickly scanned the sytntax(language part of brain is used) and then they tried to figure out the logic(multiple demand network of brain is used)

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First: that language acquisition at a later age is so much harder is not true. It takes a child 6 to 10 years to get fluent in their first language, and they don't spend 3 hours per week studying it, but 80. For adults, there are language schools with an immersive program. They are expensive, but successful. You probably won't get as good as when you'd have been immersed from day 1 in your life, but you can get quite far.

> This may not be the best way to prove the thesis conclusively.

It certainly isn't. For starters, it does not provide a comparison to normal language.

> The researchers saw little to no response to code in the language regions of the brain

And I say: screw that logic. It's faulty beyond comprehension. That a brain region doesn't light up doesn't mean anything. It could even mean their scanner was broken.

Do you have a source for that? It’s something I’ve always believed, but have never seen actually rigorously researched. I’ve long suspected the “adult language learning difficulty” is simply due to having less time as you get older (not to mention an often ossified/obstinate attitude towards learning something new from scratch and feeling clueless).

Have you never met any immigrants before? There's a very stark cutoff age before which learning a language results in no accent and after which the accent is almost impossible to eliminate.

"Language acquisition" is quite different from "no accent". My manager is a non-native speaker of English, but the only way you can tell is by his accent -- he's perfectly fluent, both in construction and in comphrenension.

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