Language fundamentally defines and distinguishes us as humans, as members of society, and as individuals. As we go through life, our relationship with language and with learning shifts and changes, but it remains significant. This book is an up-to-date resource for graduate students and researchers in second language (L2) acquisition who are interested in language learning across the lifespan. The main goal is to survey and evaluate what is known about the linguistic-cognition-affect associations that occur in L2 learning from birth through senescence (passing through the stages of childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and third age), the extent to which L2 acquisition may be seen as contributing to healthy and active aging, the impact of the development of personalized, technology-enhanced communicative L2 environments, and how these phenomena are to be approached scientifically and methodologically. The effects of certain specific variables, such as gender, socio-economic background, and bilingualism are also analyzed, as we argue that chronological age does not determine the positioning of L2 learners across the lifespan: age is part of a complex web of social distinctions such as psychological and individual factors that intersect in the construction of a learner’s relative status and opportunities.

Simone E. Pfenninger is Professor of English Linguistics at the University of Zurich. Her principal research areas are variationist SLA, psycholinguistics, and multilingualism, especially in regard to quantitative approaches and statistical methods and techniques for language application in education.

Julia Festman is Professor of Multilingualism at University College of Teacher Education Tyrol in Innsbruck. Her main research focus is on multilingualism on the individual, cognitive, and educational level. She combines psycholinguistic, neurolinguistic, and neuroscientific methods for investigating learning and processing of multiple languages.

David Singleton is Emeritus Fellow at Trinity College Dublin. He served as Secretary General of AILA and as President of EUROSLA. He is a EUROSLA Distinguished Scholar and an Honorary Member of AILA.