Learning a New Language Against Alzheimer's Disease - Alzheimer's 09

CD to learn several foreign languages, illustration only

Can you speak more than one language?

Here, one of activities of churches and libraries is to facilitate communities to learn new languages.

This service is free and everybody can join them. A chapel on campus serves not only English (English Second Language) but also Spanish and Chinese. How fun!

For children, many of them grow up exposed to two languages from an early age. It does not hard for them to learn more than one language at the same time, even they tend to borrow one word from another.

We still remember the concepts in the past about bilingual. It said that bilingual was bad for brain. By then, many scientists have conducted researches about bilingual and multilingual. 

Learning Spanish

The researches had been done for bilinguals in all level of ages, from bilingual in baby to bilingual in elderly. Many amazing findings about them.

Brian Gold, a neuroscientist found that people who bilingual since childhood are better at the high-order thinking than monolingual seniors.

Craik and his colleagues conducted a research for 211 patients who diagnosed with probable Alzheimer's in clinics at Baycrest, Toronto, Canada. They classified the patients as bilingual (102 patients) and as monolingual (109 patients).

He said “We found that the bilingual patients had been diagnosed 4.3 years later and had reported the onset of symptoms 5.1 years later than the monolingual patients. Bilingualism thus appears to contribute to cognitive reserve, which acts to compensate for the effects of accumulated neuropathology”

The data confirm that lifelong bilingualism give a protection against the onset of Alzheimer's Disease.