Being bilingual brings brain benefits

Neuroscientists have discovered that being bilingual, as opposed to monolingual, protects against cognitive declines related to age. A study was recently done at the University of Kentucky in Lexington by Brian Gold to provide further information. Researchers use FMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) to compare the differences in brain activity during certain tasks. This study was published recently in the Journal of Neuroscience and goes on to further explain why bilinguals typically show more efficiently in task switching.

About 110 people were recruited for these surveys who were considered to be lifelong bilinguals, and who specifically spoke English and any other language daily since 10 or younger. The survey resulted in the bilinguals and monolinguals scoring about the same scores on memory; however in the experiments that tested switching between perceptual tasks, the older monolinguals were slower than the adult older bilinguals.

“The fact that only the older bilinguals reveal these differences also demonstrates that this isn’t a simple effect,” Kroll said. “After all, the older lifelong bilinguals were once younger lifelong bilinguals.”

According to the study, the older bilinguals were using their brain more efficiently than the monolinguals.

“This suggests that neural efficiency may represent a core underlying mechanism of the bilingual task-switching advantage in aging,” the study authors wrote.

There had been some skepticism about whether it was truly the knowledge of two languages that’s linked to particular benefits in aging, or some other underlying characteristic that bilinguals have, but the research supports the advance skills in task-changing amongst bilinguals.

“We and others have suggested that bilinguals are ‘mental jugglers’ for whom the continuous activity of both languages imposes the demand to select the intended language, but we are still at an early stage of understanding how language experience specifically produces the sort of neural efficiency reported in this study,” Kroll said.