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[buravirgil]

The researchers discovered that the harder adults tried to learn an artificial language, the worse they were at deciphering the language’s morphology — the structure and deployment of linguistic units such as root words, suffixes, and prefixes.
http://newsoffice.mit.edu/2014/trying-harder-makes-it-more-difficult-to-learn-some-aspects-of-language-0721
The author, Amy Finn, admits,

“It’s an idea that’s been around for a long time, but there hasn’t been any data that experimentally show that it’s true.”

The term acquisition doesn't appear until late in the article and given definition with the terms procedural and declarative memory, distinctions first used with the study of an amnesiac in 1962 in explanation of a motor-skill memory. Further,

"Still unresolved is the question of whether adults can overcome this language-learning obstacle. Finn says she does not have a good answer yet but she is now testing the effects of “turning off” the adult prefrontal cortex using a technique called transcranial magnetic stimulation. Other interventions she plans to study include distracting the prefrontal cortex by forcing it to perform other tasks while language is heard, and treating subjects with drugs that impair activity in that brain region."

As most teachers are trained to posit, the learning process is not directly observable, but it sounds like Amy Finn's plans to alternatively magnetically stimulate and impair the brain via drugs will narrow the "observable".

[fluffyhamster]

If acquiring foreign languages worked best when impaired and without much cognitive effort, then a lot more TEFLers would surely be fluent already! And grammaticality isn't always strictly observed in real communication anyway.