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. "
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
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.
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.