I'm an uncoordinated, slow, late learner but I love having a new skill.
A late learner, or opsimath, she can't understand what took her so long to get round to books, which are wonderfully humanising ("At the risk of sounding like a piece of steak," she says, "they tenderise one") and remind her of the night she slipped out and mingled with the crowds on VE Day: "There was something of that, she felt, to reading.
During these transitional steps right hemispheric recruitment was observed, with increasing left-lateralization, which is similar to other native signers and L2 learners of spoken language; however, specialization for sign language processing with activation in the inferior parietal lobule (i.e., angular gyrus), even for late learners, was observed.
Consistent with previous research, age groups that were younger or older than 11 years were considered as early and late starters in FL contexts; whereas in SL settings, younger than 15 and older than 16 were grouped as early and late learners, respectively.
Deaf adults who acquired sign language at an early age showed more left anterior neural activation to grammatical judgments than late learners, who showed more posterior activation (Mayberry, Chen, Witcher, & Klein, 2011).
Other mechanisms, such as proactive interference, whereby previously established knowledge may compete and even interfere with subsequent learning, may also be at work in late learners and in some instances result in an early learning advantage [50].
The third group comprised seven native English multilinguals who were late learners of Chinese, studying Mandarin at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London.
The effect seems to be concentrated on late learners who are still enrolled in primary school despite being older than 13 years of age.
Theories of second language learning have proposed that the differences between early and late learners are due to differences in neural plasticity, such that L1 phonemic categories become more robust with age, making it harder to acquire new L2 categories in adulthood (Flege, 1995; Iverson et al., 2003).
According to the Learning and Skills Council's latest learner satisfaction survey, nine out of 10 students are "satisfied with the overall learning experience" and 67% go even further and say they are "very" or "extremely" satisfied.
