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. "

Wow

[wbean]

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

Re:

[malsdavis]

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 vocabula

Re:

[bob65]

Not sure if being a nerd automatically implies higher than average brain usage though.

Re:

[arodland]

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

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:

[SatanicPuppy]

I doubt it. A lot of the studies on dementia have boiled down to: if your brain is more flexible, you develop symptoms much more slowly. People with more education tend to exhibit symptoms much more slowly, people who know extra languages exhibit symptoms much more slowly.

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 usefu

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.

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[account_deleted]

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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.

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[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 desc

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?

[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.

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[nblender]

I can support this as well. I was born in Austria and lived there til I was 3. Then moved here where I promptly had to learn english. My parents continued speaking to me in austrian but I would respond in english. Years later, I can still understand german/austrian fine when it is spoken to me but I have trouble making my mouth speak it. In the late 80's, I went there with my wife who didn't speak any german at all so I had to translate. After about 2 days of full immersion, it was like a switch was tur

Re:

[drsquare]

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.

It wouldn't make a difference. Say for instance you taught American schoolkids German from an early age. By the time they leave school they're pretty good at it. Then they leave school, and as they live in America they never use German at all, and several years later they've forgo

Re:

[GeckoX]

So very very true.

I went through French immersion, spoke it completely fluently. Partook in exchanges to both Quebec and France, no problem whatsoever. Over 15 years ago now.

Not a lot of french is spoken in the greater Toronto area, and thus I've lost the ability.

Now, I am quite certain that if I was thrown into a french speaking environment, I would very likely pick it up again quite quickly. But it's certainly not an ability I can just pull out at my own whim anymore.

"White folks are weird"?

[alienmole]

Plenty of European "white folks" speak at least two languages - often their home country's language and English, but also other regional languages. If you're going to go down the path of stereotyping everyone different from you (following a lot of white folk, btw), at least get it right: you're probably really mainly thinking of Americans and/or British white folk.

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[kestasjk]

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.

When I said "does being the sort of person who learns another language mean that you already were less susceptible?" I should have said "does being the sort of person who learns another language in a unilingual culture mean that you already were less susceptible?".

You'r

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[edibleplastic]

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.

To be fair, most of the bilinguals you refer to learned their second language very early in age. There is an enormous amount of research that shows that it is much easier to acquire the syntax and phonology of a foreign language the earlier in life you begin learning it. The

Re:

[Rakshasa Taisab]

If you mean West as in north-west of the Atlantic ocean, sure.

But in Europa, pretty much everyone speaks at least 2 languages, and learning a 3rd in high-school is mandatory in most countries. Sure, not everyone learns the 3rd one well... But monolingualism is pretty rare here.

Hell, I'm on my 5th language and I've never been any good at learning them.

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.

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.

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[Dun Malg]

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.

Do you really think learning the language in 12-24 months is fast? I learned Russian well enough to read and discuss Crime and Punishment after 8 months at the Defense Language Institute when I was in the Army, and all we had was classroom instruction and textbooks. Achieving basic fluency after 12 months of immersion is only average for an adult, and downright pedestrian compared to how fast a child under 5 can pick it up.

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[account_deleted]

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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.

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[alshithead]

I think that it has more to do with using more of your brain. Kids do better learning 2nd, 3rd, or other languages...whether they are spoken or otherwise. You can include maths and music. It's more about stretching your brain's abilities. If you stretch earlier, you promote more pathways and therefore help prevent problems in the future. There probably is still a genetic aspect for dementia of all types but, the more you expand, the less or later the impact.

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[svunt]

Effect. "Lifelong bilingualism" specifically precludes the intellectually curious & agile. Lifelong bilinguals are generally people raised in a bilingual home, so the children of immigrants, residents of polylingual societies, etc. People smart enough to want to learn another language when they're infants would have to be a teensy bit rare, I'd guess.

Re:Cause or effect?

[Riktov]

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.

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.)

Great

[Frogbert]

I can understand English and whatever language New Zealanders speak, do I count as bilingual?


:P

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

whatever language New Zealanders speak

It should, because it certainly isn't english.

anklebiter: toddler, kids
home and hosed: safe, completed successfully
corker: very good
get off the grass: exclamation of disbelief; equivalent to "stop pulling my leg" and "no way"
Good on ya, mate!: congratulations
skiting: bragging
Wally: incompetent person, loser (my name's Wally, you insensitive clod!)
and many more [nz.com].

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[strider44]

diponds... ef yow er relly god et et thin meybe.

Specific Languages?

[Rie Beam]

Were all of the languages the same, or was this a general trend? Like, if you spoke both German and, say, Japanese, would you have a slightly longer or shorter shelf life than, say, Spanish and Portuguese?

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[Rie Beam]

Okay, it might help to actually read the article.

"Of that group, 91 were monolingual and 93 were bilingual. The bilinguals included speakers of 25 different languages, the most prevalent being Polish, Yiddish, German, Romanian and Hungarian."

But the question still stands -- was this a general trend or were certain languages "healthier"?

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[account_deleted]

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[Planesdragon]

Modern linguistics holds that ultimately there are no significant differences between languages. Since all languages are just expressions of the same deep structure, it is impossible for one to be healthier than another.

PC science aside, it's not "impossible" for one language to form significantly different brain paths in its speakers than another. Just like there are clear genetic differences between Caucasians, Africans, Asians, and between Men and Women.

The first thing I'd wonder if the study missed isn

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[account_deleted]

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[Jeffrey Baker]

And does this hold only for verbal languages? What about music?

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[Dun Malg]

And does this hold only for verbal languages? What about music?

If you can't say "which way to the bathroom" in it, it's not a language.
Music is something else entirely.

Any language?

[ktakki]

Does knowing a programming language (or two) help? This wasn't addressed in the article, of course, but I'm curious. Also, I wonder if the ability to read musical notation would have the same (or some) effect.

k.

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[ClamIAm]

My opinion is that programming languages and musical notation (I also read these) are basically different ways of writing mathematical-type expressions. So you're basically learning different ways to write down logic and relationships between abstract things. Natural language is in some ways similar, but there's the added human elements like emotion and nuance.

As for benefits, I certainly believe that knowing programming languages or any kind of abstract notation helps a person understand other abstract n

Re:

[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

I think I'm safe

[darkonc]

Lesse: C, Basic, Fortran, Algol, perl, ......

Et un peu de Francais.

Re:

[Cyberax]

Da chto vi govorite? (Sorry, Slashdot doesn't support Unicode).

Re:

[bob65]

If un peu de Francais counts, then shouldn't all Canadians be safer from dementia (compared to e.g. Americans), considering that French is mandatory through grade school and high school? :P And I guess Quebecers should be even safer, considering that they're actually fluent in both English and French.

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:

[Turn-X Alphonse]

It's not just the US. Here in the UK We're getting shitty cartoons where half the stuff is in Mexican as well. I've never even seen a Mexican and yet for some reason it's a useful language for British people to know..

Re:

[Pancake Bandit]

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. People might assume that you're stupid, because you can't speak their language. You might naturally gravitate towards other Americans, because they could understand you and help you. Oh, and English is a really hard language to learn. It's full of silly rules that make no sense.

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[account_deleted]

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[metlin]

To a great extent, this is a problem of social perception.

For instance, if someone were to speak the Queen's English with a crisp Standard RP, I would be more likely to listen to them for two reasons - one, I would understand them better and two, I would assume that someone who takes the pains to speak a particular language in the proper vernacular is, for want of a better word, sophisticated (or at the very least educated).

On the other hand, while there is an African American Vernacular, you do not see it

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[account_deleted]

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[account_deleted]

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[nelsonal]

It's technically a really easy language to learn (almost everyone who knows even a small amount of English is understandable), but it is tremendously difficult to master (as the grammar Nazi's show us very frequently).

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[Gryle]

I'm not expecting magical fluency upon entry to the US, but I don't think it's unreasonable to ask an immigrant to make an attempt to learn English. If you're going to live somewhere, it's just good manners to try and learn the native language, even if you never become proficient.

As a side note, a true story: I live in an area of Texas where a small but significant amount of the population speaks Spanish as a primary language. One day a customer who spoke only Spanish came into my workplace. While not flu

Re:

[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 wor

Re:

[TerranFury]

I'm so jealous of my friends from other countries. Language education in the U.S. is so screwed up: We don't start kids until it's far too late to learn to speak without an accent. My international friends have more than one native language; native languages come 'free!' I just have some minimal and essentially useless high school and intro college French.

Of course, my jealously extends to more than language education. It sounds like they've had so much more adventure in their lives. And they have a

The easy way to bilingualism?

[tepples]

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

hmm

[compro01]

Must be why the Canadian government hasn't gone crazy yet.

I'd just like to say...

[greenguy]

Ya lo sabía! Es una ventaja más de ser bilingüe entre las muchas que ya hay.

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.

statistics

[digitalderbs]

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 Avog

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:

[ColdWetDog]

Can you make binary statements like this with such a small pool and such close distributions?

No, of course not, except in weak papers written in obscure journals by "eminent" researchers. The fact that they use a "convenience" selection of patients that happen to wander into to their memory clinic just screams selection bias. Their total number of patients, 184, isn't terribly large which means that the standard deviation issue you bring up is more likely to be significant. I'm too lazy to to figure o

Galvanized minds?

[w33t]

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 [72.14.253.104] - google cache - the real site barely worked. just google "bilingual brocas" [google.com]

Perhaps bilingualism gives the brain some kind of extra s

Speaking as a biostatistician

[dorpus]

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 bi

What about more languages?

[Palal]

What if I know more languages? Does it increase even more?

Wunderschöne pink elephant?

[A beautiful mind]

Most nem fogom megmagyarázni hogy mi a francot jelent amit írtam, legyen elég annyi hogy 4 évvel tovább élek mint ti, haha.

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:

[dunkelfalke]

es ist Zeit, eine neue Sprache zu lernen.

now call me grammar nazi.

Finally some good news!

[Jethro]

Oh please tell me that it's exponential! I can always learn more languages...

Then again, I'm bilingual and people are always saying I'm demented.

I don't think this is specific to languages

[Secret Rabbit]

IMO, I think that this has to do with constant learning.

With regards to language, one constantly has to keep updating the colloquialisms. But, when two (or more) languages are concerned, one much also keep in mind what is the equivalent word/phrase in the other language(s). Then there's the whole translating between languages. That would require somewhat fast thought as to not lose subtleties.

I imagine the same is true for anyone that constantly learns and/or has to do consistently high level critical th

A little off-topic... but funny, nevertheless.

[NerveGas]

We had a person apply for a programming position, and on his resume, he listed polyglotism as one of his areas of interest. One of the other interviewers said "That's terrific! All of us here speak another language - let's see - Portugese, Spanish, Spanish, and Japanese. Which languages do you speak?"

The poor guy sunk about six inches into his chair as he confessed "Well... none, really."

well, unless...

[oohshiny]

the two languages happen to be C and Java--then, dementia sets in instantly (I should know!). Fortunately, it's partially reversible.

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)

Don't get too excited.

[TheNarrator]

Correlation does not equal causation. All people's brains are not perfectly equal. Perhaps suffering from dementia later means the brain has more processing capacity to spare, thus making learning two languages easier earlier in life.

The girlfriend

[SpaghettiPattern]

The girlfriend. She loves bilingualism.

Kuplah!

[Tablizer]

Kuplah!

You don't f**king say!

[davmoo]

I'm fluent in both English and profanity, does that count?

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.

exercise delays decline?

[Kopretinka]

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.

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

[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:

[MrAnnoyanceToYou]

Nah. It's been proven that learning things like SQL flat out increase mental instability.

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.

I do a wee bit better than that.

[patio11]

As long as we're talking about human languages on Slashdot for a change, let me give you my pitch: STUDY A LANGUAGE. I'm a native speaker of English who also speaks passable Japanese and can program. There aren't exactly tens of thousands of people with that skillset. There are more than a few positions that require it (including my current job), and every time I hear of a new one the hiring official practically begs me to introduce him to anyone I know who would fit the bill. I'm not exactly hot stuff

Re:

[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

Re:

[sporkme]

What about Japanese people that speak English?

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).

Re:

[christophe]

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 endan

Re:

[linuxci]

And actually studying different languages is quite fun.
 
Well, from what I've heard, in Western Europe it is de rigueur to speak at least three languages. It's not even admirable in countries like Switzerland and Germany, it's a standard requirement.

In the UK those three languages are usually en-gb, en-us and en-au

Re:

[Ethelred Unraed]

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

Re:Stands to reason

[nacturation]

ANY language in addition to English.

Ellway, ouyay oday eakspay Igpay Atinlay, on'tday ouyay?
 

Re:

[eebra82]

Given the fact that scientists have drawn a parallel here, why not? Obviously, being bilingual is the key factor here and it is likely going to look better if you speak more languages fluently. In other words, the more similar the languages are, the "less" bilingual you get. English and Japanese have nothing in common and therefore require far more learning, understanding and whatnot.

I speak five languages - four of them fluently - so I guess I'm in the safe zone. :)

Re:

[The Hobo]

Où est-ce que j'ai laissé mes lunettes?

I'm one of those bilingual Canadians. Where I come from, bilingual typically means French and English since they are the two official and most popular languages. Those who are bilingual are often that way from birth.. the way I see it is if you speak French in Ontario you speak English as well. You catch English like a cold, it's simply much easier. The concept of putting off dementia if you're bilingual is an interesting one, since I have some memories in

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.