Achievement

A team of students drawn from 4 departments (Computer Science, Linguistics, Second Language Acquisition, Hearing & Speech Sciences) continued the research that was begun at our first Winter Storm workshop (Jan 2009), using computational modeling to investigate the causes of "critical period" effects in language learning, i.e., the decline around puberty in the ability to learn languages to a native-like level. The team presented their work at the leading international conference in Second Language Acquisition research, and it is in submission for journal publication. This is a project that relied crucially on the combined talents of the participating students, as none of them could have provided all of the skills on their own.