Results were largely replicated in our native-born Canadian MCI participants, ruling out immigration as a potential confound. In areas related to language and cognitive control (LCC), both multilingual MCI and AD patients had thicker cortex than the monolinguals. In medial temporal disease-related (DR) areas, we found higher tissue density in multilingual MCIs versus monolingual MCIs, but similar or lower tissue density in multilingual AD versus monolingual AD, a pattern consistent with cognitive reserve in AD. We examined cortical thickness and tissue density in monolingual and multilingual MCI and AD patients matched (within Diagnosis Groups) on demographic and cognitive variables. More research on that issue is needed, according to the Mayo Clinic.Two independent lines of research provide evidence that speaking more than one language may 1) contribute to increased grey matter in healthy younger and older adults and 2) delay cognitive symptoms in mild cognitive impairment (MCI) or Alzheimer disease (AD). Some research suggests that being bilingual may also help stave off Alzheimer’s disease and dementia for a few years by keeping the brain nimble and increasing the amount of gray matter, though other studies have had conflicting results. In a previous study, Marian and her colleagues found that bilingual children were able to ignore classroom noise more easily than monolingual children. Knowing multiple languages may have other benefits, too. The new study added to the field by showing that the task of filtering information activates different brain areas in bilinguals and monolinguals, Abutalebi said. “There is actually a big discussion about whether the bilingual advantage exists or not,” said Jubin Abutalebi, a cognitive neurologist at the University San Raffaele in Milan, Italy. Most of the previous research on the benefits of bilingualism has focused solely on behavior, which has drawn criticism from some scientists. “But the bilingual is also stronger, because they’ve been mentally ‘working out’ like this for their whole life.” “The bilingual has to lift more weight than the monolingual, because bilinguals experience competition within and between both their languages while listening to speech,” the researchers said in an e-mail. The researchers compared the task with lifting weights at a gym. In other words, monolinguals’ brains had to work much harder to perform the task, the researchers said. The brains of people who spoke only one language lit up much more than those of their bilingual counterparts in regions involved in controlling higher-level functions, including suppressing competing word meanings. However, their brain activity was markedly different, the scans revealed. As fast as they could, the volunteers had to pick the picture that showed the word they heard.īilingual people were no faster at performing the task than monolinguals.
For example, they might hear the word “cloud” and see pictures of a cloud, a clown and two other things. The researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to scan the brains of 17 people who were fluent in both Spanish and English and 18 who spoke only English.ĭuring the experiment, volunteers heard the name of an object and simultaneously were shown a picture of that object, as well as an object with a similar-sounding name, and two unrelated objects. In the new study, the researchers looked at how the ability to filter information manifests itself in the brain. In previous studies of people’s eye movements, Marian and her colleagues found that when bilingual people heard a word in one language, they often looked at objects whose names sounded similar to that word in their second language.
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