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. "

Comments

Wow

[wbean]

Wow, does that include Fortan and Cobal? (Couldn't be C# because it requires lifelong fluency.)

Re:Wow

[Andrew Kismet]

Well if size and complexity are the deciding factors, then Perl should be the best at keeping you going out of your mind :)
Fixed.

Re:Wow

[indifferent children]

A compiler is the ultimate spelling and grammar Nazi.

Cause or effect?

[kestasjk]

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.

Re:Cause or effect?

[CRCulver]

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?

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.

Re:Cause or effect?

[metlin]

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.

Re:Cause or effect?

[Riktov]

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.

Re:Cause or effect?

[o2sd]

People still look at me funny when I tell them I learned english at the age of 11 and speak 5 other languages. White folks are weird.

Reminds me of a Swiss guy I met in Beijing. He was already tri-lingual by the age of 16 (Swiss French, Italian, German), then learned English and Spanish after high school before going to Taiwan to study Mandarin Chinese. He was in Beijing for sight seeing before heading to Moscow to learn Russian.

And yet hardly a month goes by without another idiotic article in the paper describing how difficult it is to learn a second language. White people ... sheesh.

Re:Cause or effect?

[rynthetyn]

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.

Re:Cause or effect?

[Monkelectric]

It seems really strange now to hear well-off Americans complain that learning languages is "too hard" and requires special talent

Learn some neurology then. The brain looses its plasticity for languages after the age of about 14. It *IS* extremely difficult to acquire a language after that age -- and if you do it is actually stored in a physically different location in your brain than your primary language.

This is the same reason that people who don't learn to read after a certain age almost *NEVER* learn to read.

The human brain has windows during which it is most receptive to acquiring new abilities. After those windows expire it is very difficult and in some cases impossible to acquire those abilities.

So blame the American educational system. Most language courses are offered at the freshman level of high school -- about the age of 15.

Re:Cause or effect?

[niktemadur]

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.

4 years?

[TodMinuit]

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?

Re:4 years?

[Max Romantschuk]

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.)

Some people think bilingualism is bad

[pembo13]

Some people think bilingualism is something for 3rd world countries. Of course I've only heard this sentiment expressed in the USA.

Re:Some people think bilingualism is bad

[The MAZZTer]

I'm seeing more and more Spanish-translated stuff popping up in the US, and not just near the southern border either...

Re:Some people think bilingualism is bad

[Gothmolly]

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.

Re:Some people think bilingualism is bad

[CRCulver]

Those kinds of people just get frustrated that immmigrants don't magically know English upon entering the United States. I wish they'd imagine what it would be like if they went to live in another country with a different language.

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.

It's full of silly rules that make no sense. Even people who learn it at a young age and speak it their whole lives have trouble with it.

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.

Re:Some people think bilingualism is bad

[CRCulver]

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.

The easy way to bilingualism?

[tepples]

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

Simple conservation of confusion

[NotQuiteReal]

Be confused with multilingual voices in your head for much of your life... or just a concentrated dose for the last four years.

Stands to reason

[Gryle]

"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?

Re:Stands to reason

[TerranFury]

>I fail to see your point. Don't additional skills usually warrant an increase in paygrade?

Depends.

If your second language is Spanish and you work in Miami -- definitely.
If your second language is Swahili and you work in Vermont -- well, probably not.

Kinda like how, if I learned the skill of snake charming, and I worked in an I.T. department, I wouldn't expect any extras in my paycheck. ;-)

Re:Stands to reason

[Anonymous Coward]

Kinda like how, if I learned the skill of snake charming, and I worked in an I.T. department, I wouldn't expect any extras in my paycheck. ;-)

But if you worked as a flight attendant, it might just come in handy!

Re:Stands to reason

[OldManAndTheC]

Kinda like how, if I learned the skill of snake charming, and I worked in an I.T. department, I wouldn't expect any extras in my paycheck

Just add "Expert with Python" to your resume.

Re:Stands to reason

[nacturation]

ANY language in addition to English. Ellway, ouyay oday eakspay Igpay Atinlay, on'tday ouyay?

Re:Stands to reason

[Potor]

I disagree. I once worked at IBM, and they hired me, they said, because I knew Latin. I would submit that Latin is to IBM as Swahili is to Vermont (mutatis mutandis).

Knowing another language also means an ability to think outside of the box (excuse the cliché, but I am tired), because knowing another language is simply the culmination of a bunch of other skills you have (intellectual/cultural curiosity, tenacity, an open mind, and strong analytic / synthetic skills, not to mention probably vastly improved English skills).

In fact, this last point is probably the strongest argument. I have acquired a three other languages since I turned 19, and although I am perfect in none of them, my English skills are extremely strong because of the extended process of comparative grammar I have undertaken.

But since I am not a life-long bilingual, I expect now to lose my mind at 71. I guess all you slashdotters who've been coding since the cradle are safe though.

Re:Research funding needs more scrutiny

[audacity242]

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.

Re:statistics

[dorpus]

Normally, we would test a difference in means between two populations by a t-test. If the sample size is large enough, then even a difference that is only a fraction of a standard deviation can be statistically significant. F-tests are used in ANOVA tables, and yes, they do assume normal distributions, as well as homoskedasticity (same variance). Assuming they performed a linear regression, then one can perform a Type I F-test (added-in-order test) or Type II F-test (added-last test). One can also talk about an overall F-test, testing whether any of the effects in the model are nonzero. However, as I indicated in another post, 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.

Re:I'd just like to say...

[Propaganda13]

Let me be the first to say "Tengo un gato en mis pantalones."

Either that or "Tengo un sandwich de jamón en mi sombrero." After that, the conversation usually goes downhill from there.

Bullshit

[Alphager]

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.

Not just bilingualism - mental activity in general

[Raul654]

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)

Re:I do a wee bit better than that.

[silkenphoenixx]

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).

Re:Any language?

[Knutsi]

This will be guesswork on my behalf (not yet a doctor), but if I was to make an uneducated guess as to what causes this, i would suggest it is the constant increased level of activity in the brain of a multilingual person. It makes sence, that you have to engage larger patterns of knowledge when navigating between languages. If you learn a thing in one language, you also learn it in a second. If you know 10.000 words in two languages, I'm quite sure this accounts for quite a bit of added activity in the learning process, and is contsantly being stimulated by life around you. It should suggest that the more languages you know, the better the effect.

People claim that memorising a few things every day, such as learning a poem, keeps your mind kicking beyond the average age. I'm not sure this is a the actual case, but it is interesting.

(What the article fails to address is wether these people where speaking the language activly, or if they just knew it. I would take it there is a bit of a difference)

The patterns of a programming language is probably not being stimulated very much in your head as you move through the world, and I think it's scope is quite narrow. I'd doubt simply knowing one will have an effect, but maybe if you programme allot, the challenge of constructing systems and flows should be an interesting challenge for the mind, hopefully keeping it young (:

Stupid, ignorant, or fraud

[Futurepower(R)]

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.

But you may only get to keep your native language

[joeflies]

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.

Re:I do a wee bit better than that.

[christophe]

in Western Europe it is de rigueur to speak at least three languages. Well, Western Europe is a big place with many different nations. You can expect people from small countries, like Swiss or Belgians, to be fluent in one or two foreign languages, and people from Sweden or Danemark to speak very good English and often German. But the average French barely speaks enough English for international business (with many exceptions), and English people don't even have to learn another language. Situation seems better in Germany, at least for English. IMHO, that has more to do with the educational system and motivation than anything else. Exposure to foreign content (most films in original version with subtitles on TV for example, as in Danemark) is another key.

(Spoken as a French which speaks three languages).

What is a valuable skill?

[Savage-Rabbit]

Kinda like how, if I learned the skill of snake charming, and I worked in an I.T. department, I wouldn't expect any extras in my paycheck. ;-) You seem to value skills only if they result in a pay rise, this is a major mistake. You see... while snake charming might not get you an increase in pay it will significantly increase your chances of survival when it comes to dealing with management. This is true in any industry, not just IT and has been true for many millennia, which actually makes snake charming a most valuable skill.