How Bilingualism Protects Our Aging Brain

Being bilingual can be defined as speaking more than one language with medium to high-level proficiency. Currently, more than half of the world's population can speak a second language. This is leading to more interest and research into bilingualism as time goes on.

​There is a lot of research which shows that bilingualism has developmental, educational, socio-cultural and cognitive benefits. But what happens to our brain when we age?

As we age, we typically experience a decline in cognitive functioning and a loss of grey matter (which control our movement, memory and emotions) in our brain. However, being bilingual can slow this process down and can even protect our brain as we age, to some extent. It is thought that this happens due to the constant mental exercise by switching between languages in daily life, leads to bilinguals having better cognitive functions, such as memory, inhibitory control and decision-making, compared to people who speak only one language.

Here is what the evidence has shown (studies below cited in Waldie et al., 2020):

• Bilinguals have better episodic memory; we remember more personal life events as we get older, when compared to people who speak only one language (Libersky et al., 2023)
• Bilingualism can protect against decline in cognitive functioning with age (Borsa et al., 2018)
• Loss of brain grey matter volume, has been shown to be delayed in bilinguals compared to monolingual seniors (Del Maschio et al., 2018)
• There is a 4.5-year delay in Alzheimer’s disease in bilinguals, compared to monolinguals (Woumans et al., 2015)
• There is also a bilingualism advantage in cognitive recovery after stroke (Alladi et al., 2016)      

 
The good news is - it is never too late to learn a new language in life! In fact, continuing to stimulate our brain and learn new things as we get older has been shown to protect our brain as we age, even well into the later years. 

Speak soon,
The Expat Speechie

References:
                     Libersky, E., Crespo, K., Reppe, A., & Kaushanskaya, M. (2023). Effects of bilingualism on autobiographical memory: variation in idea density and retrieval speed. Memory, 31(4), 491–501. 
                Waldie, K. E., Badzakova-Trajkov, G., Park, H. R. P., Zheng, Y., Neumann, D., & Zamani Foroushani, N. (2020). The cognitive and neural correlates of written language: a selective review of bilingualism. Journal of the Royal Society of New Zealand, 51(1), 81–96.