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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. "
Does learning another language make you less susceptible to dementia, or does being the sort of person who learns another language mean that you already were less susceptible?
It would be interesting to compare the dementia rates in bilingual people in unilingual(?) cultures and bilingual people in bilingual cultures, but it looks like this study was limited to a couple of hundred people at a single mental health clinic.
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And how long does it take for me to become (and stay) bilingual? Is there a net gain, or would my time be better spent elsewhere?
I wonder if I use bold in my signature, people will notice my posts.
Does Toki Pona count? It's amazing what one can do with only 120 words.
I was curious about the claim (and standard deviations) and pulled up the paper. The mean for monolinguals is 71.4 +/- 9.6 and the mean for bilinguals is 75.5 +/- 8.5. Now those std deviations are 1*sigma (68.3%) leaving a lot of overlap between the two distributions. However, they claim that these two distributions are statistically different by an F-test (if I'm not mistaken, which assumes that both distributions are normal). I'm not a clinical statician and I'm used to working with numbers closer to Avogadro's; how statistically significant are these results? Can you make binary statements like this with such a small pool and such close distributions?
I find this interesting. Since these are apparently, "life long" bilinguals, they must have learned the second language at an early age.
I would seem that having two languages one's whole life would somehow affect a brain. However, I think research shows that life-long bilinguals actually use the same region of their brain when speaking either language.
As shown by this article - google cache - the real site barely worked. just google "bilingual brocas"
Perhaps bilingualism gives the brain some kind of extra strength - or flexibility. Maybe more than just the broca's area gets an extra workout, and that effort pays off in the long marathon of dementia.
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This isn't the first report to note mental health benefits from knowing another language, there have been many studies done on the matter, I remember recently reading a report which showed bilingualism (along with ambidexterity among other things) helps prevent/delay Alzheimers.
While on the face of it, the various studies would seem to imply that programming languages help in this way, I doubt they are quite as beneficial as a natural language due (among other things) to the comparatively minuscule vocabulary and grammatical flexibility that programming languages generally use.
The general indications are though that all brain usage assists to ward off mental health degeneration however so the good news for Slashdotters is that just being a nerd helps in itself!
I am the Son of a Diplomat. This means that every 4 to 5 years, we went to a different country as a family. We _ALL_ managed to learn the foreign language in ~12 months (this means that we could function normally in school, understood the local television and had no problems reading newspapers). After 24 months, one can master the language to the point where literature-studies are not harder in any language. Of course, it helps to really live _IN_ the country among locals, not in some kind of gated community where everybody speaks your language. And we never got satelite-TV, so all TV-chanels were in the local language. End effect is that my whole family is multi-lingual. Even my parents, who where significantly older than 5 when they learned these other languages.
In the book 'Everything Bad is Good For You', they mentioned several studies that have come to the same general conclusion - staying mentally active tends to reduce both the incidence and seriousness of mental disease. One nunnery they studied, whose order believes than an idle mind is the devil's playground, the incidence of mental disease was a fraction of the total population, and the overall lifespans were tremendously greater (the two librarians were 97 and 99 years old)
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
Prescriptivism is dying in England, as well. RP is pretty much dead, and what passes for RP now among the elderly has marked differences from the standard set down a century ago. It's replacement as the standard English accent, Estuary English, is learnt more through osmosis just by living in the area than by rigorous schooling and hearing that this is the "right way to speak". Nevermind that in some former British colonies, such as Nigeria and India, the masses learning English nowadays are taking it in crazy directions that the British upper classes who brought the language there could have never imagined.
They are always grasping at any straws they possibly can reach to push their agenda regarding everyone else having to be Swedish-speaking so that they don't feel like they are in the minority. They LOVE the idea already that bilingualism makes a person holier than anything -- as long, of course, as one of the languages happens to be Swedish. Their unyielding faith and low-quality arguments make them seem like a local branch office of Creationism.
Based on the supposed sense of tolerance and civilization their language brings to everyone it touches (particularly, Finnish-speakers), our government already mandates Swedish in the most ludicrous ways, even in things where the language is completely irrelevant (like completing a Master's in CS), just to make you have to live it and love it. If you don't, well, too bad, you aren't supposed to exist here if you don't agree to pass the language-political litmus test. Their greatest idea is "language-bathing" Finnish-speaking kids by denying them an education in their own native language. They would even have Finnish taught to them in Swedish. This, of course, destroys the base of a Finnish-speaking educated class and returns us to the darkest medieval days of Swedish rule. All this in the name of tolerance towards the minority.
I can already see them pushing mandatory Swedish on public health grounds... after all, we're getting older as a nation and dementia is a major concern. Who on Earth would want to get DEMENTIA? If you are only Finnish-speaking [that is, you don't speak Swedish and no matter how many other languages you do speak], you're probably already demented though...
I think you've touched on an important point there, it's the extra mental activity that increases the brain's longevity, and studying (or even learning on a conversational level) an extra language really streches the brain's proverbial muscles, speaking as a bi-lingual myself. It requitres an increase of one's mental capacities, one eventually learns to think in another language rather than deciding what you want to say in English and translating it before speaking. It's the exercise that helps.
Note the article said that being bi-lingual fends off dementia, not death, as was implied in a post somewhere above this one. Thus not working as hard because of a pay increase due to an extra language has nothing to do with it, and that's totally ignoring the fact that we generally associate working harder with increased longevity (although increased job stress would counter this out).
I know this is only annecdotal, but my good friend works at Asian nursing home. They hire billigual people to help the elderly, because after the onset of dementia, many of the patients only remember their native tongue. Their children who were raised in the US without being trained in their parent's language often find themselves unable to communicate with their elderly parents.
If you exercise, it's understandable that you'll be fitter longer. Bilingualism is to the brain like living in a hilly terrain to the legs. I'm dazzled that the scientists would be dazzled by a finding like this.
Yesterday was the time to do it right. Are we having a REVOLUTION yet?
I think this has economic roots. Dubbing has about the same cost in every language, but the cost for the final customer is very different according to the size of population/market.
France (like Germany) is a big market (60/80 millions people) to make dubbing economically feasible. Danemark for example (5 millions people) only dubs movies for children ; subtitles are enough for the rest. It is not a wonder to have very good English-speaking Danes when most of their TV speaks English. (It goes as far as endangering the Danish book industry: succesfull English or American books are read in English before the translated Danish version is available.)
In some Eastern Europe countries exit a cheap version of dubbing, with one or two actors reading translated text without synching the lips. They're used to it... Many Swiss people are probably accustomed to switching between their 3 or 4 official languages.
I can assure you that ALL foreign movies are dubbed in France, in the cinemas or on TV. Subtitles are not mainstream (this is laziness). But it's true that a rather big "cultural" alternative market exists for many people like me who prefer the original voices (with subtitles) and see it as a way to improve their English or German. It you want original content, you can have it (French-German TV broadcast TV channel, many free foreign TV channels through ADSL, cinemas in big cities).
On the other side, our educational system needs to seriously improve the way foreign languages are teached (even if the default is that most children between 10 and 14 must begin to learn 2 languages (mainly English+Spanish, sometimes German or Italian).
As for clinging to our language with zeal, it is resistance of a once-powerful country in face of the power of English - and the American influence in many ways and areas, which goes with it. In my mind, the real problem has more to do with the lack of bi/trilinguism than with protecting French (which won't disappear). And we won't make ourselves understood by speaking so badly foreign languages.
I'm astonished that so many countries accept so easily to throw all their own identity and use English (and only English) in so many areas: Scandinavian pop music, European Union internal communication, business relationships... I understand the practical reasons, but still...
Christophe (Don't hesitate to point out my spelling and grammar mistakes, I want to learn - Thanks).
I am a lifelong bilingual (English/French), and I have quite distinct personality traits depending on the language I'm using. In English, I am reserved and polite whereas in French, I am more outgoing, brash and tend to swear more.
If I go out for an evening with Francophone friends, we drink wine, live to eat (expensive "fine" food), and talk about each other. If I go out with Anglophones, we drink beer, eat to live (cheap familiar food like pizza), and talk about current affairs. There are more jokes in English, but more sex and ribaldry in French.
It's a nice balance. I suspect if I only spent time with French folk, I'll eventually die of liver failure, whereas if I only spent time with Anglophones, I'll die of heart disease. I can't be bothered to check which is statistically likely to kill me first, but surely I'm hedging my risk between the two?
I can understand how the French would want to cling to their language, because English is a bastard child. James D. Nicoll noted:
Personally, I would prefer Spanish to become the lingua franca since it is probably the cleanest of the Romance languages (and doesn't have all the silent endings that make me want to claw my eyes out when studying English or French). But we are stuck with English for at least the next 30 years or so I'm guessing. Perhaps the de facto lingua franca status will allow people to get the motivation to clean up the abysmal spelling of English.