A Study Reveals That Bilingualism Slows Dementia
Several studies reveal that bilingualism slows down dementia and especially Alzheimer’s disease. One of the most prominent studies was that of Dr. Ellen Bialystok, a professor at York University in Toronto.
Bialystok and her team concluded that learning to speak another language can delay the onset of Alzheimer’s by up to five years. She based the research on data from the medical records of 200 people diagnosed with the disease.
This is not the first time Dr. Bialystok’s studies have revealed that bilingualism protects against dementia. She had already performed similar studies with 184 patients, and the conclusions were the same in 2007. According to most professionals, learning a new language is one of the best brain exercises a person can do.
Bilingualism slows dementia
Learning and using another language involves the implementation of several complex brain functions. Dr. Bialystok points out that those who speak two or more languages constantly have to make decisions about how to express an idea.
More precisely, this means that those who are bilingual continuously use the executive functions of the brain. The brain does a kind of gymnastics through these parallel exercises between the vocabulary and the structures of each language.
The executive functions not only make it possible to contrast and translate between the two languages, but also provide a basis for the development of other skills and functions. Furthermore, bilingualism reduces dementia and also makes you smarter and more likely to do well on other intellectual tasks.
It is for all these reasons that Bialystok concluded that bilingualism modifies the way the human brain functions. It makes them more efficient. It is probably this change that delays the onset of Alzheimer’s disease and other types of dementia by an average of four to five years.
Bilingualism and cognition
Dr. Marco Calabria, Professor of Neuropsychology at the University of Oberta de Catalunya , also researched the relationship between bilingualism and the maintenance or deterioration of brain functions. He claims that the brain of a bilingual person is different from a monolingual one.
Furthermore, Calabria points out that a bilingual person is not the same as the sum of two monolinguals. What a person who speaks two languages develops is a kind of supervisory function. It is a control that controls the mental and motor activities to develop when speaking in one or the other language.
In the same way, he points out that learning a second language acts as a cognitive reserve. It is not enough to just learn the language, but 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 some research 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 the ages of 11 and 73 years. (Everyone in the test had English as their mother tongue.)
In the second test, 262 people reported being able to communicate in two languages. Among them, 195 had learned the second language before they were 18 and 65 at a later date. The results revealed that all the bilingual participants also had higher cognitive skills than the others, as well as greater intellectual ability.
Finally, Bak said that learning a second language definitely reduces cognitive decline. He also points out that this effect is the same in bilinguals and multilinguals. Thus, the brain changes in the same way whether you learn two languages or five. The results of all these studies are just another reason to learn another language.
