Achievement

A cross-disciplinary research group on ‘critical periods’ in language development was formed as a part of our program’s intensive 2-week Winter Storm workshop, bringing together students from Second Language Acquisition, Linguistics, Computer Science, Psychology, and Hearing Speech Sciences. The discussions during the workshop were so productive that the group continued to meet regularly over the subsequent months. The outcome of this activity is a new research effort that uses neuro-computational modeling to better understand the neurocognitive basis for children’s advantage over adults in language learning. This outcome is noteworthy due to the limited connections in past research between computer science, the psychology of memory, and second language acquisition.