Text 1
Little is known about how adults master a second language to a native-like level. For decades, many scholars have argued that a critical period ends near adolescence. After that, reduced brain plasticity makes full acquisition improbable. They point to laboratory tasks where adults lag behind child learners and to imaging studies that show different activation patterns. In this view, intensive adult programs can teach communication skills, but rarely produce native-like proficiency. This interpretation has shaped policy and testing in many countries, even as debates continue about the limits of adult learning.
Text 2
Ultimately, any strong claim about age limits should rest on broad empirical records. Linguist Nora Fielding and her team pooled data from thousands of adult learners who used years of immersion and explicit instruction. Many reached near-native scores on demanding comprehension and grammar tests. In separate studies, highly proficient adults showed brain responses that matched those of native speakers during rapid sentence processing. Fielding argues that these results weaken the assumption of a hard cutoff and suggest that input, time, and instruction often determine the attainable ceiling for adult learners.
Based on the texts, how would the author of Text 2 most likely respond to the claim in Text 1 about a strict critical period for adult second language learning?
