Why can’t adults learn languages like children?
In: Biology
If you learn something new, this must be stored in your brain (obviously). These memories are actually stored within the connections between your neurons: generally, a whole group of neurons become connected more strongly and this strengthened connectivity is your new memory.
Kids brains are much more plastic than those of adults, which means that the formation of new connected neuronal networks goes much faster and probably also includes more neurons as it would for adults. Thus, their brains just learn better and faster.
For languages specifically it also seems to be stored differently. If you learn multiple languages as a kid, each language is encoded within its own population of neurons, with only limited overlap. If you learn a new language as adult though, you cannot ‘claim’ a new population of neurons, so instead the language is encoded within the areas that also code for your already known languages.
Therefor, the kids can later keep the languages apart much better as people who learned it later can (I know this for a fact as I have to switch between dutch, german and english on a daily basis and fail miserably to keep the languages apart)
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