Late last year, Ellen Bialystok of York University in Toronto, Canada, presented some of the most compelling research on bilingualism and aging. Her findings reveal that monolinguals are diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease four to five years earlier than bilinguals.
Tamar Gollan, a researcher at the University of California San Diego Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center, elaborated:
Bilingualism doesn’t prevent you from getting Alzheimer’s disease; it doesn’t prevent brain damage from happening if you have the disease. What it does is it makes you continue to function, even in the face of having damage to the brain. You can imagine an athlete with an injury crossing the finish line, even though they’re injured.
Therefore, the experience of using more than one language reorganizes your brain. Bialystok believes:
The more you use another language, the better you get at it. Well, that’s not surprising, but along with that, the more you use two languages, the more your brain subtly rewires.
So that means the more experience with bilingualism leads to greater changes. The longer you’re bilingual, the more the changes. The earlier you start being bilingual, the more the changes. The more intense your bilingual experience is on a daily basis, the more the changes.
Part of bilingualism’s beneficial effects has to do with the act of forcing your brain to multitask. This exercise can influence other aspects of your life involving concentration.
Bialystok said:
The effect it has is, I believe, is on the attention system. This is what cognition is, knowing what you need to attend to and blocking out the rest.
Bilinguals are constantly managing the interference of languages, with either language activated automatically and subconsciously. This advantage influences executive functions such as skills that allow you to control, direct and manage your attention and plan. The brain area responsible for completing a task when there are distractions is more robust.
Gollan added:
When you’re bilingual, you can’t turn one language off, so you’re constantly having to face choices that monolingual speakers don’t have to make. So, in addition, you have to ‘work hard to be bilingual.
Similarly, individuals with a demanding job or those who are highly educated might also see later onset of Alzheimer’s disease. These people’s brains are more resilient thanks to all the hard work they had to do over the years. So, even though individuals can’t avoid the disease, their minds will remain functional for longer.
Bialystok said:
In later life language learning, we can see narrower — but significant — benefits of the same variety that we see in lifelong bilinguals. For example, people will say that as you exercise more, you expand your capacity for oxygen. Well, I think as you exercise your brain more, you expand the capacity for the brain to learn more things and keep flexible.
Therefore, learning a new language is a great activity to keep your brain active. It’s highly challenging, and there’s the bonus of being able to communicate better with more people. Meaning, becoming bi- or multi-lingual opens horizons you may not even know existed.
Gollan said:
The nice thing about bilingualism is if you’re bilingual, you can reap all the benefits of these related things in one. Because now you have a much broader audience of people you can talk to, and talking to people is good.
Bilingualism can also keep you young for longer. Your brain starts to decline around the age of around 25. Over the years, things like your efficiency, working memory, processing speed, and concentration declines at an accelerating rate. Speaking more than one language makes that decline less steep.
Bilingualism is also great for children. The brains of children between the age of zero to three are uniquely suited to learn multiple languages because the brain is in its most flexible stage. As a result, infants exposed to two languages could detect a switch between them as early as six months old. Furthermore, they can learn a second language as quickly as they can learn their primary language and walk.
Young children absorb sounds, intonation patterns, structures, and the rules of a second language with ease since they don’t focus so much on grammar rules and practice as adults do. Also, children up until the age of eight benefit from having flexible speech and ear muscles that can detect differences between the second language’s sounds.
Furthermore, bilingual children are better at solving certain kinds of brain puzzles. For example, according to a 2004 study by psychologists Michelle Martin-Rhee and Ellen Bialystok, bilingual youth are more successful at dividing objects by color and shape than their monolingual peers.
Their experiment showed that monolinguals struggled when a second characteristic to sort was added. The findings suggest that the bilingual experience improves the brain’s command center, thus allowing it to solve problems, plan, and execute other mentally demanding tasks. Such tasks include switching attention from one thing to another and retaining information in mind (for example, remembering a sequence of directions).
Adults can benefit from picking up a second language as well, albeit with more difficulty than children. According to a 2013 study by Kapa and Colombo, young bilingual adults had better concentration, performed better on attention tests, and responded faster and more accurately than young monolingual adults.
Interestingly, language switching is natural for bilinguals.
So, even though it’s a workout for the brain, there’s no extra work involved once the language becomes second nature. To prove this, a more recent study by New York University neuroscientists found that the brain uses a shared mechanism for uniting words from a single language as for two different languages. This phenomenon enables a seamless transition in understanding multiple languages simultaneously.
Sarah Phillips, an NYU doctoral candidate and the study’s lead author explained:
Our brains are capable of engaging in multiple languages. Languages may differ in what sounds they use and how they organize words to form sentences. However, all languages involve the process of combining words to express complex thoughts.
Liina Pylkkänen, a professor in the NYU Department of Psychology and Department of Linguistics and the study’s senior author, added:
Bilinguals show a fascinating version of this process–their brains readily combine words from different languages together, much like when combining words from the same language.
The scientists demonstrated this through experiments that measured the neural activity of English/Korean bilinguals. The study’s subjects viewed a series of picture and word combinations on a computer screen that consisted of two-word sentences or a pair of non-combining verbs (for example, “icicles melt” versus “jump melt”). Sometimes, the word pairs came from a single language, while other times, both languages were used to mimic mixed-language conversations.
All the while, the researchers measured the subjects’ brain activity by mapping neural activity. To do so, they used magnetoencephalography (MEG) – a technique that records magnetic fields generated by the electrical currents our brains produce. The recordings revealed that bilinguals use the exact neural mechanism when interpreting mixed-language expressions as they do while interpreting single-language terms.
In addition, they found that the brain region which combines the meanings of multiple words (the left anterior temporal lobe) was insensitive to whether the words received were from the same language or different languages.
Phillips concluded:
This research shows that bilingual brains can, with striking ease, interpret complex expressions containing words from different languages.
So, there you have it! Learning a second language slows down aging and fends off disease. Plus, once you know the language and practice it regularly, you’ll communicate with more people effortlessly. Just spend an hour a day memorizing a set of new words; you won’t regret it!
