The effects of bilingualism on Alzheimer's are back in the news, though all I could access for the moment was the WebMD article summarizing the study. Given that the study was just published yesterday in Proceeding of the National Academy of Sciences, I suppose that's not surprising. If I remember, I'll have to check back later and see if it's been released, because I desperately want more info on their participant characteristics. So, like earlier work, this study appears to compare Alzheimer's patients who are either monolingual or "bilingual" (again, more info would be nice). Rather than comparing patient histories in symptom onset, this study actually tested performance in memory tasks, finding that bilinguals outperformed monolinguals. Importantly, and like the previous studies of symptom onset, this was true even though their brains show signs of being more deteriorated than their monolingual counterparts. Still fascinating research, and hopefully this is less likely to be misreported as indicating that bilingualism prevents Alzheimer's (it might, but given that these studies have all been done on people with Alzheimer's, that's just not something they can conclude). In short, bilingualism strengthens the brain in such a way as to allow it to continue to function even when damaged. But who were their participants? The previous work was with immigrants to Canada who regularly used two languages. Not exactly early heritage, and frankly kind of a difficult group to categorize. The current study was done in Italy, so perhaps the characteristics were a little different, maybe even closer to mimicking formal L2 learner? But who knows, which is why I'm not so sure about this line: The study also suggests that kids who learn a second language and use it often will benefit in their old age, Perani said. I'll have to read the original to know the context of this statement. Is she referring to heritage bilingual children who maintain their bilingualism through the lifespan? Or is this going the extra step of suggesting that classroom L2 learners could result in similar gains as long as they stick w/their studies? I'd (somewhat selfishly, given my own bilingual experience and family history) love for the latter to be true, but so far I haven't seen any research w/that specific population, so suggest away, but we need to be careful about making conclusions.
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AuthorThis is a place where I record thoughts on second language research and pedagogical theory Archives
June 2019
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