Fast and Flexible: Greater Neural Plasticity in the Language Network During Implicit Linguistic Learning in Children than Adults

It is widely believed that language learning becomes more effortful with age, yet direct evidence for this developmental shift is scarce. Understanding how statistical learning (SL)—the implicit process of detecting and extracting regularities—changes across development may explain why children acquire language more efficiently than adults.Ina behavioral and an fMRI experiment, participants completed a linguistic (Syllable) SL task, with a nonlinguistic (Tone) task as control. Learning was measured via reaction time acceleration and brain activation differences between structured and random auditory streams. Children showed faster learning than adults in the Syllable SL task only. fMRI revealed that children’s language network showed earlier and stronger short-term plasticity to linguistic patterns than adults’.Greater neural sensitivity was further associated with faster linguistic SL in children, but not in adults.These findings suggest that children’s developing language network is better equipped to efficiently acquire new linguistic regularities than adults’.