Difficulties in Later Learning of 'Technical' Languages?

I'm wondering, since we have trouble mastering a spoken language if we start learning it after the end of puberty (or thereabouts, as I understand it), does this apply to what you might call 'technical languages' such as the concepts in something like statistics or other branches of maths? Is it that if we learn them later in life we are not able to think with them as dexterously? Even though we treat these things as distinct from spoken language, it's not obvious (to me at least) that the brain necessarily should. I'm wondering what research has been done into this, or what knowledge might give us clues to the answer?