Memory, Social Structure and Language: Why Siestas affect Morphological Complexity

Children are better than adults at learning second languages.  Children find it easy, can do it implicitly and achieve a native-like competence.  However, as we get older we find learning a new language difficult, we need explicit teaching and find some aspects difficult to master such as grammar and pronunciation.  What is the reason for this?  The foremost theories suggest it is linked to memory constraints (Paradis, 2004; Ullman, 2005).  Children find it easy to incorporate knowledge into procedural memory – memory that encodes procedures and motor skills and has been linked to grammar, morphology and pronunciation.  Procedural memory atrophies in adults, but they develop good declarative memory – memory that stores facts and is used for retrieving lexical items.  This seems to explain the difference between adults and children in second language learning.  However, this is a proximate explanation.  What about the ultimate explanation about why languages are like this?

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