A paper co-authored by Professor Julián Villegas of the University of Aizu has been published in Cognition.

Is it too late to learn to hear a new language?
Not if you keep building your skills. Researchers tested young and older Spanish speakers who learned Basque as a second language, asking them to spot sounds that occurred in the beginning or the middle of words in Basque sentences.

When they started learning, how often they used the language, even how often they switched between languages: none of it mattered once proficiency was taken into account. And on their use of grammar and sound cues to find words, these young and older learners matched native speakers. The only edge natives kept was in using meaning to find word boundaries.
In later life, how well you know a language beats when you learned it.

Want to learn more? Read our open-access paper "Word segmentation abilities across the adult lifespan: Evidence from younger and older adult bilinguals"
(https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0010027726003124)

Name of Journal: Cognition

Authors: Patricia Fuente-García, Julián Villegas, Adam Zawiszewski, and Irene de la Cruz-Pavía.

Title: Word segmentation abilities across the adult lifespan: Evidence from younger and older adult bilinguals

Date of publication: Oct. 2026

Link to publication: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0010027726003124

About Cognition

Cognition (Elsevier B.V. ,Q1, h-index = 242) is an international journal that publishes theoretical and experimental papers on the study of the mind. It covers a wide variety of subjects concerning all the different aspects of cognition, ranging from experimental studies of behavior and of the brain to formal analysis.