First, children's widespread success in acquiring secong languages belies a tremendous subconscious effort devoted to the task.As you have discovered in other reading, children exercise a good deal of both cognitive and affective effort in order to internalize both native and second language. The difference between children and adults lies primarily in the contrast between the child's spontaneous, peripheral attention to language forms and the adult's overt,focal awareness of and attention to those forms. Therefore, the popular notion about children holds only if"effort" refers, rather narrowly, to focal attention to language forms.