The early markers of foreign language learning in older adulthood

Although research on the beneficial effects of late-life language learning is rapidly gaining in popularity, much remains unknown about third-age language learning in general. To this end, we conducted a pilot study to examine the effects of brief but intensive foreign language learning in a group of 64-78-year old healthy seniors on their cognitive functioning and well-being, as well as to investigate their foreign language learning progress and the relation between the two. Dutch older adults completed a battery of cognitive and linguistic tasks, and participated in three short tasks while their electroencephalogram was recorded, both before and after participation in a ten-day online Spanish course. Crucially, the Spanish curriculum had an immersive character – it did not involve explicit instructions or translations, and it emphasized communicative competences such as speaking and listening. While older adults showed significant improvements in accuracy in both Spanish production and comprehension, they did not improve in relation to general well-being or attentional control as a result of participation in the course. Although we identified small possible vocabulary learning effects in ERP waveforms, no significant differences were observed. Lastly, working memory capacity predicted overall accuracy obtained in a Spanish vocabulary production task, and the number of languages learned across the lifespan was related to response latencies for cognates and non-cognates in that same task. Our study is the first to show that healthy older adults can quickly achieve vocabulary learning through an immersive online foreign language course. Additionally, it replicated the predictive effect of working memory on foreign language learning gains found in previous work. Although additional testing is required, our study contributes to the growing body of literature on third-age foreign language learning and its early markers.