OT: Bilingualism and dementia

[Amy West]

On 6/1/11 12:00 AM, Automatic digest processor wrote:
> Date:    Tue, 31 May 2011 21:37:05 -0400
> From:    "Joel S. Berson"<Berson at ATT.NET>
> Subject: Bilingualists are faster
>
> According to research by Ellen Bialystok, a cognitive neuroscientist,
> and a distinguished research professor of psychology [although not
> honored by capital letters} at York University, Toronto, "the
> conventional wisdom was that bilingualism was a disadvantage. Some of
> this was xenophobia. Thanks to science, we now know that the opposite
> is true."
>
> Billingualists are smarter, acquire Alzheimer's 5 or 6 years later,
> are better at multitasking, and faster on even non-verbal
> tests.  (But high-school French is not sufficient.)
>
> The NYTimes, May 31, 2011.
> http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/31/science/31conversation.html?scp=1&sq=bilingualism%20bialystok&st=cse
>

While not a true bilingual, having learned his second and third
languages in high school and college, my father spoke German and Russian
and worked translating Russian scientific articles and documents. I
started teaching myself German with his German books when I was quite
young; I never managed to teach myself Russian. But I had head start
when I took German in college, and we would speak German to each other.

My father is now 80 and has mild dementia. It's been coming on for a
bit, but became a crisis last summer. He's been losing the languages as
the dementia progresses. I didn't realize it until my brother asked me
at one point how the German "quizzes," as he calls them, were going
while I was taking care of my father: they weren't. My father had
stopped speaking German. And on the bike path near his house there was a
scale-model of the solar system set up via signs for each planet with
the name in multiple languages, including Russian. (My father is an
astronomer.) When we walk the path, he'll stop and read the signs: he
recognizes the Cyrillic, and tries to sound out the words, but I think
the Russian will be gone soon, also.

--
---Amy West

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