Welcome to the Learning Languages in Society with Gabi podcast, where it’s all about the fascinating world of languages and culture. Let’s rock.
Hi everybody and welcome to my show, my name is Gabi. Fist of all I have to apologize for being absent in the past week. I had to sort out some issues, but everything is now fine and I’m back on track.
Today we’re going to talk about how learning a new language in childhood or adolescence could be so beneficial for our brain as we get older. As people become older their cognitive capacities, that is, their mental capacities to process information and function in a correct way in the world start to diminish. But we are ever so lucky to have a super powerful weapon against aging, namely, learning foreign languages.
So on top of all the cool things that we can do with languages such as traveling, meeting new people, expanding your cultural perspective of the world, watching movies and reading books in original version we now know thanks to a tone of research that learning languages is also beneficial to help our brain cope with disease and aging. What are the odds?
Now obviously that is great news!
But before we go on, we’re going to give the definition of two important concepts, namely, neuroplasticity and cognition.
Neuroplasticity is the brain's ability to change and grow throughout a person's life. Until recently, scientists thought that this was only possible in early childhood. After that, scientists believed that the brain “solidified” and became fixed in its habits, which pretty much means they thought we could no longer learn new stuff.
Now we know that is simply not the case. Our brain can find new ways to learn and reorganize itself in order to keep on learning, even after brain injury.
Now, that is good news as well!
Now we’re going to talk about another word commonly used in these contexts, namely, cognition: cognition, or cognitive development, includes the mental processes related to reasoning, memory, problem-solving, and thinking skills.
It is in essence, the ability to perceive and react, process and understand, store and retrieve information, make decisions and produce appropriate responses. So cognition pretty much governs your life. And learning foreign languages when young helps you improve your cognition too.
Great news again!
Since people are getting older nowadays we strive to find new ways to improve their brains without necessarily using pharmaceutics.
Research has proven that bilingualism has been linked to higher cognitive reserve, better performance in executive control, changes in brain structure and function relative to monolinguals and last but no least, delay in the onset of dementia.
And so this is as I mentioned before why learning a new language could be one powerful antidote to prevent the brain from degrading in old age.
Now, let’s get to the details, what is Cognitive reserve? Well it is the idea that people develop a reserve of thinking abilities during their lives and that this protects them against losses that can occur through aging and disease.
Executive control: the ability to carry out goal-directed behavior using complex mental processes and cognitive abilities. For example, if you receive a bad score in an exam but you maintain focus and understand constructive criticism and then you study again and learn and do well in your exam next time, well, it means that you have good executive control. Learning a new language in your childhood or teenage years helps you do that.
Results in recent research tend to suggest that second language learning is associated with improvement in attentional switching, inhibition and working memory.
Attentional switching: it is the ability to flexibly shift “back and forth'' between multiple tasks, operations, or mental sets. Basically to be able to do different tasks at the same time and easily switch from one to the other back and forth.
Inhibition : it is the action of inhibiting a process. For example, if you are bilingual, inhibition is the capacity to prevent your mother tongue to come to bother you while you are in the process of speaking your second language.
Cognitive control advantages associated with bilingualism come from having to juggle representations of two different languages in one's mind. The dual activation theory posits that while a representation of one language is activated, its correlate in the other language is activated at the same time. Thus, a bilingual person would constantly have to inhibit one language while using the other resulting in the betterment of cognitive control. How wonderful.
For example, if you’re speaking Russian with someone and you can’t find a word, inhibition will help you find your word in Russian and prevent English, which is your mother tongue, from popping up and suggesting the word in English.
Working memory: it is the retention of a small amount of information in a readily accessible form. It facilitates planning, comprehension, reasoning, and problem-solving.
So as you can see learning a foreign language early on has all these amazing benefits.
However, let’s keep in mind that cognitive reserve and successful aging have been associated with lifestyle factors, including education, participation in leisure and social activities and or physical exercise. So we could say that a combination of all these factors make the difference.
Some studies suggest that dual-language use has been associated with executive functioning benefits to subjects of all age groups and we can see these results more clearly in older adults because young adults already function at their peak.
Which pretty much means that if we examine older adults who have been bilingual for a long time we will see that their lifelong use of more than one language could lead to enhanced cognition in later life.
A few studies conducted in elderly individuals have evidenced an advantage in episodic memory, letter fluency, semantic verbal fluency, as well as higher general intelligence in bilingual seniors.
We can also see that the differences aren’t only in performance but we can also see them with our own eyes. Why do I say that? Well, neuroimaging studies have also reported differences in brain measures between monolingual and bilingual older adults, showing higher gray matter volume (GMV) in different parts of the brain of bilingual adults.
And this discovery is really cool, check it out:
studies in young adults show increases in hippocampus volume after second language training . As the hippocampus plays an important role in episodic memory, and hippocampal atrophy is widely recognized as a biomarker of Alzheimer's disease, an increases in its volume, as a result of SLA, could be of significance in the face of age-related atrophy and cognitive decline. Furthermore, older bilinguals have been shown to have greater left hippocampal GMV than their monolingual counterparts.
That’s amazing, isn’t it?
Do you need more reasons to learn a new language??