The Bilingual Brain: Human Evolution and Second Language Acquisition

Abstract

For the past half-century, psycholinguistic research has concerned itself with two mysteries of human cognition: (1) that children universally acquire a highly abstract, computationally complex set of linguistic rules rapidly and effortlessly, and (2) that second language acquisition (SLA) among adults is, conversely, slow, laborious, highly variable, and virtually never results in native fluency. We now have a decent, if approximate, understanding of the biological foundations of first language acquisition, thanks in large part to Lenneberg's (1964, 1984) seminal work on the critical period hypothesis. More recently, the elements of a promising theory of language and evolution have emerged as well (see e.g. Bickerton, 1981 , 1990 ; Leiberman, 1984, 1987). I argue here that the empirical foundations of an evolutionary theory of language are now solid enough to support an account of bilingualism and adult SLA as well. Specifically, I will show that evidence from the environment of evolutionary adaptation of paleolithic humans suggests that for our nomadic ancestors, the ability to master a language early in life was an eminently useful adaptation. However, the ability to acquire another language in adulthood was not, and consequently was not selected for propagation.