Some years ago, in an uncharacteristic attempt at self-improvement, My Lovely Wife and I enrolled in a couple of beginning French classes through a local community education program. We had both achieved some minimal familiarity with Spanish during our long-ago high school days, but we figured so little of that language remained in our cluttered brains that there might be sufficient room in there for fragments of another tongue.
Besides, we were considering a trip to Brussels, where we assumed we would need some rudimentary phrases to navigate that part of the Belgian landscape that leans primarily on French. In that event, I wanted at least to be able to gracefully apologize for my awkward communication by mastering a single phrase: Je suis désolé. Je suis Américain.
I had to look that up, by the way, which illustrates just how little of that perplexing language has stuck with me.
I’m recalling that humbling linguistic journey after stumbling upon recent research suggesting that learning a second — or third or fourth — language may boost the aging brain’s ability to defend itself against the onslaught of dementia. And it made me wonder whether I should’ve studied a little harder.
In one paper, published last fall in the journal Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, researchers at Montreal’s Concordia University compared the brains of monolingual and bilingual seniors displaying three distinct stages of cognitive impairment. They found that those speaking more than one language exhibited less atrophy in the hippocampus — the main region of the brain for learning and memory — than their monolingual peers.
The relative health of their hippocampi suggests that even those bilingualists exhibiting some level of cognitive dysfunction retained a measure of brain resilience that allowed them to function more efficiently than their monolingual peers dealing with similar cognitive issues.
“The brain volume in the Alzheimer’s-related area was the same across the healthy older adults, the two risk states, and the Alzheimer’s-disease group in the bilingual participants,” explains lead study author Kristina Coulter, a doctoral candidate at Concordia. “This suggests that there may be some form of brain maintenance related to bilingualism.”
It’s all about building what’s known as “cognitive reserve,” notes Yow Wei Quin, PhD, a professor at the Singapore University of Technology and Design. And learning a second language — especially at a young age — may be key to developing that resilience.
In an earlier study, published in Scientific Reports, Yow and her team found that the bilingual brain is more able than its monolingual cousin to use alternative neural pathways and regions to perform tasks when the effects of aging block normal routes. “These reserves highlight the brain’s flexibility and resilience,” she explains. “An individual with greater reserves is likely to maintain good cognitive function in aging.”
That’s because, as the Concordia study also noted, mastering more than one language changes the brain. Yow’s team found that the regions of the bilingualist brain associated with language and cognitive-control processes featured a higher volume of gray matter, greater cortical thickness, and larger surface area than the brains of monolinguists.
This is especially true of those who mastered a second language at an early age, Yow notes. And that leaves me wondering whether I’ll be playing with less than a full deck in my dotage unless I make some attempt to perhaps recapture a slice of the limited Spanish proficiency of my youth. Es más fácil que el Francés, pero aún así. …
So, I was mildly relieved last week to notice a study from a team of Norwegian and British researchers that offers a measure of hope for us monolinguists in the form of … a little exercise.
Katrien Segaert, PhD, an associate professor at the University of Birmingham’s School of Psychology, and her crew recruited two groups of older adults — one bilingual and one monolingual — and tested their language comprehension after a six-month home-based exercise program. All the participants showed improvement in their overall fitness level at the end of the program, but only the monolinguists showed improved performance on the cognitive test. The results were published in the journal Aging, Neuropsychology, and Cognition.
“This is the first study we know of that establishes a causal link between improving fitness and language processing, particularly with older adults,” Segaert explains. “The results of the monolingual group show that increasing fitness is related to better cognition, which underlines how important regular exercise is for healthy aging.”
The cognitive improvement was not dramatic — monolinguists completed the cognitive tests 7 percent faster than they had done before the fitness program — but every little bit helps, I suppose. As (I think) the French would put it, Fais ce que tu peux.
This Post Has 0 Comments