Slashdot Mirror
Bilingualism Delays Onset of Dementia
Dee writes with word of a Canadian study indicating that lifelong bilingualism delays the onset of dementia by 4 years. The scientists were reportedly "dazzled" by the results. From the article: "The researchers determined that the mean age of onset of dementia symptoms in the monolingual group was 71.4 years, while the bilingual group was 75.5 years. This difference remained even after considering the possible effect of cultural differences, immigration, formal education, employment and even gender as influencers in the results. "
it's too bad political doublespeak seems to ensure it.
The real reason why bilinguals live longer is because they don't have to work as hard to make a living. At my work (city hall) bilinguals get $600 extra per month just for knowing another language. I'm in the same paygrade as a bilingual animal waste disposal person (it's an actual job). Talk about a shitty job
I'm seeing more and more Spanish-translated stuff popping up in the US, and not just near the southern border either...
While your comment is an obvious troll, I'll bite. Americans assume that you don't need to be bilingual simply because if you speak English, you DONT need to be bilingual. You can travel in the entire UK Commonwealth, the US, most of western Europe and Central America, and get by with English. It's the language of the Internet, it's the language of business. A German friend works for a Japanese country (in Germany) - what do they all speak? English. It's not the US' fault that it speaks one of the world's most popular languages.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
The majority of the world is bilingual or multilingual. Especially in the countries refered to as Third World, people are forced to pick up at least one second language in childhood, and often continue learning languages throughout life. John Edward's Multilingualism (New York: Penguin, 1996) is an eye-opening introduction to the field. It seems really strange now to hear well-off Americans complain that learning languages is "too hard" and requires special talent, when one can plainly see that any poor and uneducated peasant does it succesfully and without complaint.
So when you say "being the sort of person who learns another language", I hope you aren't suggesting that only language nerds with special brains do so. Multilingualism is a general human phenomenon, it's people in the West who are usual.
"At my work (city hall) bilinguals get $600 extra per month just for knowing another language."
I fail to see your point. Don't additional skills usually warrant an increase in paygrade?
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not entirely sure about the universe - Einstein
The study only had 184 patients from a single treatment center. There is selection bias, since the study only sampled patients who were already suffering from memory loss. How many other bilingual immigrants with memory loss are lurking in the general population, who aren't going to memory loss clinics due to lack of knowledge? Also, what method did they use to adjust for "cultural differences, immigration, formal education, employment and even gender" with only 184 patients?
The study only proves that bilingual patients who arrived at a particular treatment center were, on average, 4 years older than monolingual patients. It does NOT provide a causal link between bilingualism and cognitive reserve.
I think the frustration is not that people don't immediately learn English--even the most vocal opponents of Mexican immigration I've encountered understand that English is difficult--but rather that some immigrants don't even seem to try to learn. For when large areas of major cities now have Spanish-language billboards, the locals only know the culture they see on Univision and miss out on traditional American references, and there's not even a need for one living there to learn English, then there's understandably a fear of balkanization. Personally speaking, however, I dig Latino immigrants, and when I used to live in the U.S. I spent a lot of time in such neighbourhoods.
Native speakers automatically speak perfectly correct English, since correct English is determined by how native speakers speak. You are thinking that people speak incorrectly just because they don't mold their speech to artificial proscriptivist norms, but this is antiquated reasoning from the era when all languages had to be just like Latin (no split infinitives, prepositions at end of clause, etc.). Linguistics has been a purely descriptivist field for nearly a century now, but it's taking a long time for this to filter down to the public, who still get riled up if you show that there's nothing wrong with, say, African American Vernacular English.
Dude not everything can be answered with a smart ass "cause or effect". Think just a tiny bit for
yourself at what you are asking. The sort of person who is able to learn another language is
called homo sapien.
This place is populated by more and more semi educated retards daily.
And the article clearly states this is preliminary, meaning, this is essentially a pilot study. The fully controlled studies come later, but cheap studies that show correlation are the way to go, unless you want to go on wild goose chases.
Most nem fogom megmagyarázni hogy mi a francot jelent amit írtam, legyen elég annyi hogy 4 évvel tovább élek mint ti, haha.
I kind of like the idea of living 4 years longer. Does the effect stack with more than 2 languages? If that's the case then it ist Zeit für ein neu schprache gelearnen.
Sometimes the idea that my english/american is most likely better (barring accent, but could be trained) than half of the people speaking it as a native language scares me.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
My opinion is that programming languages and musical notation (I also read these) are basically different ways of writing mathematical-type expressions. So you're basically learning different ways to write down logic and relationships between abstract things. Natural language is in some ways similar, but there's the added human elements like emotion and nuance.
As for benefits, I certainly believe that knowing programming languages or any kind of abstract notation helps a person understand other abstract notations, as well as "systems" in general. The more generalized your understanding of logical/mathematical relationships between things, the easier it is to piece together the workings of different systems. This can be a benefit when learning natural languages; I've noticed that I can pick up the "rules" of a language pretty easily (I've studied Spanish). Who knows if it has health benefits, although it seems most studies show people who work their brains tend to not go senile.
OK, ramble over.
As long as we're talking about human languages on Slashdot for a change, let me give you my pitch: STUDY A LANGUAGE. I'm a native speaker of English who also speaks passable Japanese and can program. There aren't exactly tens of thousands of people with that skillset. There are more than a few positions that require it (including my current job), and every time I hear of a new one the hiring official practically begs me to introduce him to anyone I know who would fit the bill. I'm not exactly hot stuff as a programmer -- in fact, I bet you could find dozens of people who are my equal or better at any graduating class in India. None of them can do my job. This gives me job security and a variety of employment options in a quite lucrative little niche which has a nice, deep moat around it that keeps out competitors.
If you're planning on a career in IT, get yourself an answer to the question "What can you do that I can't do with two and a half Indians for the same price?" "I speak a foreign language" is an easy and sufficient answer to that question.
I'd rank languages in terms of priority by a quick mental guesstimate of our trade with the appropriate countries divided by the number of Americans who speak the language. Chinese, Japanese, and Korean are going to be high on the list. Arabic is an up-and-comer, particularly if you desire to work for the federal government. Spanish is not a great choice because we have plenty of American bilinguals. I wouldn't personally recommend the European languages because the market sizes are smaller but, hey, there is money to be made in facilitating communication and commerce with Italy or Poland and SOMEBODY is making it.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
Speaking as another former DLI student (Mandarin Chinese), one cannot really compare the situation there to that of the OP. Of course one is going to learn a language fast if severe punishment follows if one slacks off, and if one is spending eight hours a day with some of the finest language instructors in North America. If one is the average civilian without access to world-class language training, learning a foreign language in 12 months is fast.
Oh, right. The editorial review board of Neuropsychologia , the medical journal publishing this study, is still incapable of clearly distinguishing between causality and correlation, after 40 years of publishing scientific research.
I myself notice a link between Slashdot readers who read about a study claiming something that they don't want to believe, and those readers then attempting to dismiss them through trite posts about basic scientific practice. I can't say whether that link is causality or mere correlation, though.
Title of the article: "Bilingualism Has Protective Effect In Delaying Onset Of Dementia By Four Years, Canadian Study Shows"
That's either stupid, ignorant, or deliberate deception. The study did not prove causality. It showed that two phenomena seemed to be related.
Here's a quote that says what was actually shown: "Our study found that speaking two languages throughout one's life appears to be associated with [my emphasis] a delay in the onset of symptoms of dementia by four years compared to those who speak one language,"...
It's common that editors try to get attention by claiming that scientific investigation is important than it really is. I don't know what happened in this instance, but it's difficult for me to believe that the editors of a medical journal would be so ignorant about science that they would not know they were mis-reporting it.
It's not difficult to learn other languages, it just requires effort. Problem is, since much of the rest of the world learns English in school, Americans don't feel the need to bother with other languages. We could fix that problem by starting foreign language education in early elementary school, actually, that's what we should do, but there's too much political baggage that goes along with language for that to happen any time soon.
The thing to note though, is that depending on the languages, it's not hard to be multi-lingual. It's not that big a deal for someone to speak French, Italian, and Spanish, they're all basically the same language. I speak Spanish, have never studied either Italian or French, but I can understand spoken Italian and can read it, and I can read French and I don't consider myself to be particularly talented in the language learning department. Being able to speak completely unrelated languages is another thing altogether, and that does take work, though the more languages you know, the easier it becomes to learn more. And, back to the original article, the more connections you make in your brain, even when you start losing some, you're still ahead of the poor schlubs who never built those connections in the first place.
Eagles may soar, but weasles don't get sucked into jet engines...
Plenty of European "white folks" speak at least two languages - often their home country's language and English, but also other regional languages. If you're going to go down the path of stereotyping everyone different from you (following a lot of white folk, btw), at least get it right: you're probably really mainly thinking of Americans and/or British white folk.
Learning a foreign language is only useful if you're actually going to use it day in day out. For an English speaker in an English country, this isn't an issue.
I doubt it. A lot of the studies on dementia have boiled down to: if your brain is more flexible, you develop symptoms much more slowly. People with more education tend to exhibit symptoms much more slowly, people who know extra languages exhibit symptoms much more slowly.
What it boils down to is, if your brain is wired to do things in more than one way, you're more likely to be able to cope for longer when dementia starts throwing up road blocks. So, in that sense, I'd expect programming skills to be useful, due to the amount of problem solving ability that comes with coding.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.