Bilingualism Delays Onset of Dementia 472
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. "
sure, maybe bilingualism can stave off dementia (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:SEND THE ILLIGAL MEXICANS HOME (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Some people think bilingualism is bad (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Some people think bilingualism is bad (Score:3, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Stands to reason (Score:5, Insightful)
I fail to see your point. Don't additional skills usually warrant an increase in paygrade?
Speaking as a biostatistician (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Cause or effect? (Score:1, Insightful)
yourself at what you are asking. The sort of person who is able to learn another language is
called homo sapien.
This place is populated by more and more semi educated retards daily.
Re:Research funding needs more scrutiny (Score:4, Insightful)
Wunderschöne pink elephant? (Score:3, Insightful)
I kind of like the idea of living 4 years longer. Does the effect stack with more than 2 languages? If that's the case then it ist Zeit für ein neu schprache gelearnen.
Sometimes the idea that my english/american is most likely better (barring accent, but could be trained) than half of the people speaking it as a native language scares me.
Re:Stands to reason (Score:5, Insightful)
>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:Any language? (Score:2, Insightful)
As for benefits, I certainly believe that knowing programming languages or any kind of abstract notation helps a person understand other abstract notations, as well as "systems" in general. The more generalized your understanding of logical/mathematical relationships between things, the easier it is to piece together the workings of different systems. This can be a benefit when learning natural languages; I've noticed that I can pick up the "rules" of a language pretty easily (I've studied Spanish). Who knows if it has health benefits, although it seems most studies show people who work their brains tend to not go senile.
OK, ramble over.
I do a wee bit better than that. (Score:2, Insightful)
If you're planning on a career in IT, get yourself an answer to the question "What can you do that I can't do with two and a half Indians for the same price?" "I speak a foreign language" is an easy and sufficient answer to that question.
I'd rank languages in terms of priority by a quick mental guesstimate of our trade with the appropriate countries divided by the number of Americans who speak the language. Chinese, Japanese, and Korean are going to be high on the list. Arabic is an up-and-comer, particularly if you desire to work for the federal government. Spanish is not a great choice because we have plenty of American bilinguals. I wouldn't personally recommend the European languages because the market sizes are smaller but, hey, there is money to be made in facilitating communication and commerce with Italy or Poland and SOMEBODY is making it.
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Re:Cause or effect? (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh, right. The editorial review board of Neuropsychologia [elsevier.com], 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 [slashdot.org] about basic scientific practice. I can't say whether that link is causality or mere correlation, though.
Stupid, ignorant, or fraud (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Stands to reason (Score:5, Insightful)
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:Cause or effect? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
"White folks are weird"? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I do a wee bit better than that. (Score:3, Insightful)
Ahem. That may be the case in Switzerland, but in my experience (having lived 13 years in Germany) the Germans are also by and large pretty monoglot themselves -- not as bad perhaps as the French, English and especially Americans, but it's not like you find that many people in Germany who speak more than a bit of a second language (usually English). Certainly a far lower proportion than in Norway, the Netherlands, Switzerland and so on.
It is partly because there just isn't that much interest in Germany in learning other languages -- movies, TV shows, etc. are all dubbed (usually poorly to middling), English-language original editions of books don't sell remotely as well as German translations (quite often rather inferior), and so on. Before multilingual DVDs came out, it was very hard to find English-language video cassettes, unless you lived in a major city like Hamburg or Berlin. It used to be that most major cities had perhaps one or two cinemas that did show movies in English, but even that's being scaled back -- the city where I live now shows more movies in Turkish and Russian than in English (because of all the immigrants).
In Switzerland, the Netherlands and so on, by contrast, movies generally are shown in the original language (albeit often with subtitles) and the culture is more encouraging towards learning another language. In four-official-language Switzerland it's a day-to-day necessity; in official-language-pretty-much-only-spoken-here Netherlands it's a commercial necessity, just to do business with the rest of the world.
I remember visiting Amsterdam once some years ago. My (German) wife and I were accosted by a panhandler, who addressed us in Dutch. I didn't catch what he said (I only speak a bit of Dutch) and asked my wife sotto voce if she caught what he said. He apparently thought I spoke French to her, so he switched to a stream of pretty fluent-sounding French. I turned back to him, and said "What?", and he switched to (quite good) English, and said "Can I have a bit of money? I want to buy some food." I asked him how many languages he spoke. Dutch, French, German and English, he said. Why doesn't he get a job as a translator, I asked. He shrugged and said everyone in Amsterdam speaks four languages. I figured he had a point, gave him a few guilders (I don't normally give panhandlers money, but what the hell, I gave him an A for effort), and went on.
Cheers,
Ethelred
Re:Cause or effect? (Score:3, Insightful)
Learning a foreign language is only useful if you're actually going to use it day in day out. For an English speaker in an English country, this isn't an issue.
Re:Wow (Score:3, Insightful)
What it boils down to is, if your brain is wired to do things in more than one way, you're more likely to be able to cope for longer when dementia starts throwing up road blocks. So, in that sense, I'd expect programming skills to be useful, due to the amount of problem solving ability that comes with coding.