Study Shows Bilingualism Delays Dementia
Several studies have shown that bilingualism delays dementia and Alzheimer’s disease in particular (Spanish link). One of the most prominent studies was that of Dr. Ellen Bialystok, a professor at York University in Toronto (English link).
Bialystok and her team concluded that learning to speak or speak another language can delay the onset of Alzheimer’s disease by up to five years. She based the study on data from the medical records of 200 people with the disease.
This isn’t the first time Dr. Bialystok shows that bilingualism protects against dementia. She had already done a similar study in 184 patients in 2007 and the conclusions were the same. According to most professionals, learning a new language is one of the best types of brain exercise anyone can do.
Bilingualism delays dementia
Learning and using another language involves the implementation of various complex brain functions. dr. Bialystok points out that those who speak two or more languages must constantly make decisions about how to express an idea.
More precisely, this means that those who are bilingual are constantly exercising the executive functions of the brain. The brain does a kind of gymnastics through these parallel exercises between the vocabularies and structures of each language.
The executive functions not only make it possible to contrast and translate the two languages, but also form the basis for the development of other skills and functions. Bilingualism also delays dementia and it also makes you smarter and more likely to do well at other intellectual tasks.
For all these reasons, Bialystok concluded that bilingualism changes the way the human brain works (Spanish link). It makes them more efficient. It is likely this change that delays the onset of Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias by an average of four to five years.
Bilingualism and Cognition
dr. Marco Calabria, professor of neuropsychology at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, also did some research on the relationship between bilingualism and the maintenance or deterioration of brain functions. He argues that the brain of a bilingual person is different from that of a monolingual person.
Furthermore, Calabria points out that a bilingual person is not the same as the sum of two monolinguals. What someone who speaks two languages develops is a kind of supervisory function. This is a control that accompanies the mental and motor activities to develop when speaking in one language or the other.
Similarly, he points out that learning a second language acts as a cognitive reserve. It is not enough just to learn the language, but it is necessary to practice it for several years. This is so that it becomes a protective factor against dementia and cognitive impairment.
Cognitive decline and intelligence
Professor Thomas Bak is a member of the Center for Cognitive Aging and Cognitive Epidemiology at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. He is also the author of a number of studies published in the scientific journal Annals of Neurology.
Thomas also agrees that learning a second language prevents dementia and slows cognitive decline. Bak’s research model is unique in the world. He and his team studied the data of 835 people who took an intelligence test at ages 11 and 73. (Everyone in the sample was a native English speaker.)
In the second test, 262 people reported being able to communicate in two languages. Of these, 195 had learned the second language before the age of 18 and 65 at a later age. The results showed that all bilingual participants also had higher cognitive abilities than the others, as well as greater intellectual ability.
Finally, Bak said that learning a second language definitely slows down cognitive decline. He also points out that this effect is the same for bilinguals and multilinguals. So the brain changes in the same way whether you learn two or five languages. The results of all these studies are yet another reason to learn another language.
