As it turns out, expanding our vocabulary as adults doesn’t work as it did when we were children in school, said Kelly Wright, an assistant professor of language sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Young people can learn new words by doing reading exercises, acing vocabulary quizzes or listening to the grown-ups around them. But as we get older, we have to approach it differently.
“Our vocabulary grows to a certain point, but then there is something that turns off, in a similar way in which we grow from a child height to an adult height. Something kicks on in our femur, but we don’t end up 11 feet tall, and the same thing happens with our language system,” Prof. Wright said. “It doesn’t mean we can’t learn new things, but after you get past that point, you have to do it actively. Say ‘Hey mind! Wake up a little!’”