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Bilingualism Delays Onset of Dementia

Posted by kdawson on from the brain-exercise dept.

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. "

11 of 472 comments (clear)

  1. Cause or effect? by kestasjk · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

    --
    // MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
    1. Re:Cause or effect? by metlin · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Actually, born and having spent my formative years in India, I can attest to this.

      While growing up, I lived in a few states, which entailed not only learning to speak the local language, but also read and write the said language. The good news is that once you've gotten the hang of it, it's not particularly hard.

      Usually, folks learn the language of the state they are in, they learn Hindi (the national language) and of course English since it is the language of education and commerce, owing to the fact that we were a British colony.

      End result? I am quite conversant in reading and writing several languages (speak 5 and read/write 4 - of course, I can read serious literature in only three of these languages). And do note that when I mean different languages, I mean languages - not dialects (I have noticed that a lot of folks tend to mistake all Indian languages as being dialects - they are not, and depending on which part of the country the language originated, they even have different linguistic roots).

      I have also found that having learnt the skills for picking up languages as a child, it is a lot easier for me to learn a new language than it is for most people who've not had such an opportunity.

      A most equitable bargain, I'd say.

    2. Re:Cause or effect? by niktemadur · · Score: 5, Interesting

      It's not difficult to learn other languages, it just requires effort.

      You missed two crucial elements here, my good man: exposure and practice.

      I once travelled alone through Italy and France for a couple of months, and before I knew it, I was having conversations in Italian, not fluently of course, but enough to get by and then some (I got invited to a couple of parties, etc). If I had travelled with a friend, I would have spoken my native language (Spanish, similar but not identical to Italian by any means) with that person instead of making the effort to connect with the locals, so in a way, necessity became my crash course, and I was astounded by how fast I'd picked the language up.

      Similarly, I went to France right after that and it took me about a week to begin constructing my own proper sentences, even though my accent must have been grating to french ears, but the effort was appreciated and on a couple of occasions I was treated to drinks in bars, courtesy of parisians! It was a super cool exercise.

      However, sadly and predictably, about a month after I returned home I'd forgotten most of what I learned during my trip.

      Similarly, my now wife lived in Germany for a year, and a couple of years after she came back to her hometown, she'd forgotten most of what she spoke exclusively for nearly a year. She recently took a refresher course with immediate results, but now that the course is over, she doesn't have anybody to practice with, so she's forgetting it again! Getting rusty, so to speak.

      On a humorous note: I once met a guy from Chile who'd been living in the US for a couple of months. He hadn't picked up English very well yet, but he also hadn't practiced his native Spanish, so I tried to have a conversation with the guy and quickly realized he spoke no languages! Half an hour later his Spanish had fully returned, so I got to witness the language part of the mind (so to speak) in action at point-blank range.

      Most High School students in the US may take a language course, but while in Europe you drive a few hours and find yourself exposed to the stimuli of a foreign language, in the US there is a sort of language isolation, except for Spanish in the southwestern states, Florida and a few major cities, but many latinos in the US prefer to speak English anyway, and if they speak in Spanish it's like a sound in the background for most white folks, so there is neither much stimuli nor incentive for the average US citizen to be bilingual.

      OK, my point is this: take an average US citizen who thinks it difficult to learn languages, place him/her in a european-like environment, and that person will become adept at languages, sooner or later, to his/her astonishment.

      --
      Lil' Thindime, lilting a lacrimose lament, krashes the kwaint konfines of Kokonino Kounty
  2. 4 years? by TodMinuit · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.
    1. Re:4 years? by Max+Romantschuk · · Score: 3, Interesting
      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?


      Aside from the obvious benefits of simply broadening your perspective, learning a new language takes anywhere from 1 to 10 years. (I'm pretty much trilingual with Swedish, Finnish and English, know French pretty well, and some German.) Anybody can do it in one year if placed somewhere where you simply can't speak anything else. If you don't spend a lot of time, on the other hand, it'll take a lot longer. You'll also lose an extra language pertty quickly unless you use it regularly for a decent number of years.

      Then there's the question of what qualifies as bilingual. If you ask me it's the ability to express your thoughts equally and effortlessly in both languages. Otherwise you're just good at another language.

      It's interesting to note that if you're bilingual from age 0 and up it takes a little longer to learn to speak. It's also very important that one parent speaks one language to the kids, and vice versa. Otherwise they'll have a hard time determining what's what. (Our kids are Swedish/Finnish bilingual.)
      --
      .: Max Romantschuk :: http://max.romantschuk.fi/
  3. The easy way to bilingualism? by tepples · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Does Toki Pona count? It's amazing what one can do with only 120 words.

  4. Bullshit by Alphager · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  5. Not just bilingualism - mental activity in general by Raul654 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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)

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    To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
    --E.C. Stanton
  6. Re:Some people think bilingualism is bad by CRCulver · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Combined with the fact that a lot of the world learns English from proscriptivist norms, it is not surprising. And secondly, I might be wrong, but it seems to me that it is only in the US that descriptivist vernaculars take over proscriptivist vernaculars (for English, at least).

    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.

  7. Re:I do a wee bit better than that. by silkenphoenixx · · Score: 3, Interesting

    As long as we're talking about human languages on Slashdot for a change, let me give you my pitch: STUDY A LANGUAGE.
    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).
  8. But you may only get to keep your native language by joeflies · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.