(MCT) SACRAMENTO, Calif.—After school, Carlos and Carmen Nguyen shuttle between two sets of grandparents, speaking in happy bursts of English, Spanish, Tagalog and Vietnamese.
Their parents love the way languages open their children’s eyes not only to the family’s heritage but to other cultures as well.
Yet when they began their multilingual journey, they never imagined that Carlos and Carmen, now 6 and 9, also might be developing brains especially good at ignoring distractions and better able to withstand aging.
“This is incredible,” said the children’s mother, Irene Bersola-Nguyen, a California (Sacramento) State child development lecturer, who has been trading delighted e-mails with many friends about the latest study on the bilingual brain.
A team of Canadian researchers who studied people being treated for dementia found that those who regularly used two languages reported their first symptoms of a fading mind about four years later than those who used only one language.
That work, published in February’s edition of the journal Neuropsychologia, follows a 2004 study that found older bilingual people were better at paying attention despite distractions.
“Language pays off big time,” said Ellen Bialystok, lead researcher on both studies and a scientist with the Baycrest Research Centre for Aging and the Brain in Toronto.
Bialystok and others cautioned that so many factors contribute to healthy aging that it would be premature to say language skills definitely delay dementia. Still, growing indications that bilingualism may deliver lifelong benefits in cognition have captured the attention of educators and researchers.
“Ellen Bialystok is a pioneer in this field, and she’s generating quite a buzz,” said Tamar Gollan, a University of California, San Diego, professor of psychiatry who studies bilingualism. “People all over the world are replicating her findings for some of her earlier work.”
Bialystok believes one key to their special brainpower lies in the way they must constantly decide which language to use and which to suppress.
“That means you need a mechanism so that you’re only drawing from the right pool (of words),” she said. “It’s going be a mechanism that works extremely fast…while you’re producing sentences. It’s way below your radar for detecting what’s happening.”
So bilinguals get far more practice than monolinguals in using the part of the brain that focuses our attention, helping us sort through conflicting information and ignore distractions. Using two languages seems to bolster rapid decision-making, multitasking and perhaps memory.
To measure the effect in older adults, Bialystok used psychological tests designed to make us respond to information with conflicting cues. It may be a picture that requires you to move your left hand, which shows up on the right side of a computer screen. Or it may be the word “green,” written in red letters.
In such tests, bilingual people in their 70s did noticeably better than monolingual people. With lots of practice, the one-language speakers eventually caught up.
Fergus Craik, a senior scientist at Baycrest’s Rotman Research Institute who collaborates with Bialystok, said ongoing research seems to point to memory advantages.
Bilingualism may bolster the kind of memory that lets us recall specific things that happened to us or recognize a person out of context, Craik said.
Both researchers suspect that bilingualism may delay dementia in the same way that other intense mental activities are believed to, whether it is playing an instrument or solving puzzles.
Not everyone is convinced the use it or lose it strategy for maintaining healthy brain activity has been proven just yet, but it is definitely something that concerns everyone, said Charles DeCarli, a University of California professor of neurology who heads the UC Davis Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center.
“To the authors’ credit, they’re not saying that learning a language at age 50 is going to help you,” DeCarli said. “In that regard, they’re very cautious.”
© 2007 The Sacramento Bee
