CONSIDER YOURSELF lucky if you are exposed to more than one language as it protects against Alzheimer’s disease. The study said mastering two languages acts as a “mental gymnasium” by forcing the brain to multi-task. The study showed bilingual Alzheimer’s patients developed symptoms several years later than those who spoke only one language.
The US study’s findings contradict popular assumptions that switching between two or more languages has a confusing “tower of Babel” effect.
Professor Ellen Bialystok from York University in Toronto, Canada, looked at more than 200 Alzheimer’s patients, half of whom were bilingual. Infants raised bilingual from birth can distinguish not only between their two native tongues but between two languages they’ve never been exposed to, just by watching adults speak without hearing what they say, said psychologist Janet Werker of the University of British Columbia.
Babies being raised to speak one language lack these visual discrimination skills, Werker and her colleagues have found. Given regular exposure to two languages, infants develop a general ability to track closely what they hear and see in decoding languages, Werker proposed.
In the visual realm, such information may include lip movements, the rhythm of the jaw opening and closing, and the full ensemble of facial movements while talking. Werker’s earlier studies found that newborns who had been exposed prenatally to two languages prefer to listen to those languages over others and distinguish between sounds in the tongues that they regularly hear spoken.
“Bilingual infants are able to keep their languages distinct from birth and may develop an increased sensitivity to voice and face cues for different languages,” Werker said.
The American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting in Washington heard that bilingual speakers tend to outperform monolinguals in certain mental abilities, such as editing out irrelevant information and focusing on what is important. —PTI