I knew the things would come in handy:
Being Bilingual Could Protect Your Brain(Thanks, Bonnie!) Posted by languagehat at June 14, 2004 01:16 PM
--Robert PreidtMONDAY, June 14 (HealthDayNews) -- Being fluent in two languages could protect against age-related cognitive decline, says a study in the June issue of Psychology and Aging.
Researchers from York University in Toronto compared the results of 154 bilingual and monolingual middle-aged and older adults on the Simon Task, which measures reaction time and aspects of cognitive function that decline with age.
All the bilingual people in the study had used two languages every day since the age of 10.
The study found that both older and younger bilingual people performed better than those who spoke just one language. Being bilingual offers widespread benefits across a range of complex cognitive tasks, the authors concluded.
One wonders what potentially confounding variables (education, socioeconomic status, income, etc.) they controlled for. The abstract doesn't say.
Posted by: Zackary Sholem Berger at June 14, 2004 04:53 PMAs a stunted monolinguist I would just like to point out that similar benefits have been found to arise from knitting.
Phew.
Posted by: qB at June 14, 2004 05:05 PMBut things go downhill if you know more than 2 languages, to the point where if you know 7 of them your very life is in danger.
D
Posted by: Murph at June 14, 2004 06:44 PMUh oh...
Posted by: language hat at June 14, 2004 06:46 PMI wonder what degree of proficiency is necessary, in their study, to qualify as "bilingual." Will college French do the trick, or do you need to grow up bilingual (or somewhere in between)? I know that there have been studies showing that different parts of the brain are activated among people who gained bilingualism later in life, while people who grow up bilingual activate the same parts of their brain for both languages. So it seems that if we are talking about the health of the brain it would be relevant to know this information.
Posted by: Kerim Friedman at June 14, 2004 11:00 PMZackary:
All the participants in both groupsPosted by: Aidan Kehoe at June 15, 2004 03:41 AM
had bachelor’s degrees and shared similar middle-class socioeconomic backgrounds.
I remember reading somewhere that learning two languages pre-school can hinder academic performance. So if you're going to hot-house your kids linguistically, wait till they're ten. Or teach them to knit instead. That way you won't get footballs kicked through your living-room window.
Posted by: Eliza at June 15, 2004 05:11 PMI believe it. As an adult, nothing except studying and practicing music has engaged my mind so completely as the intense study of French I've been undergoing recently. I can literally "feel" my mind working in different ways, even from its normal writer-ly pathways, and it occured to me that this must really healthy brain-activity. Thanks for the confirmation, maybe I'll go study some new verbs...
Posted by: beth at June 15, 2004 06:31 PMI'll add it to my list. By my calculation, a bilingual, non-smoking vegetarian who eats a lot of cabbage, squash, garlic, tomatoes, and fish and drinks two glasses of wine a day will live to be about 137 on the average.
Posted by: zizka / John Emerson at June 16, 2004 02:46 AMWhich means the rest of us have to endure his/her halitosis for 137 years.
Posted by: Eliza at June 16, 2004 12:19 PM