Bilingualism's Brain Benefits

[Harold F. Schiffman]

Forwarded from the Washington Post, washingtonpost.com

Science Notebook

Monday, June 14, 2004; Page A07

Bilingualism's Brain Benefits


Bilingual speakers are better able to deal with distractions than those
who speak only a single language, and that may help offset age-related
declines in mental performance, researchers say.  In studies conducted in
Canada, India and Hong Kong, psychologists determined that individuals who
spoke two languages with equal proficiency and used both equally did
better than monolingual volunteers on tests that measured how quickly they
could perform while distracted.

"The bilingual advantage was greater for older participants," the
researchers wrote yesterday in the journal Psychology and Aging, adding
that "bilingualism appears to offset age-related losses" in certain mental
processes. Researchers used the Simon task, a test used to measure mental
abilities that are known to decline with age. Test takers saw a red or a
blue square flash on a computer screen and were told to depress one or the
other of the two "shift" keys depending on which color appeared. As
previous research has found, performance slowed when the colored squares
moved from their original positions.

Three experiments showed that bilingual speakers of Cantonese and English,
Tamil and English or French and English consistently outperformed
English-only speakers, said the researchers at York University and the
Rotman Research Institute in Toronto, and Dalhousie University in Halifax,
Nova Scotia. The team, led by Ellen Bialystok at York University,
hypothesized that the ability to hold two languages in the mind at the
same time, without allowing words and grammar from one to slip into the
other, might account for the greater control needed to perform well on the
Simon task. An alternate hypothesis is that bilinguals have superior
working memories for storing and processing information.

-- Shankar Vedantam


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A39338-2004Jun13.html