I’m interested in the interaction between language-learning and cognition - the mental processes of the brain. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. He addresses how best to teach languages to children and lays out evidence that multiple-language use on a regular basis may help delay the onset of Alzheimer’s disease. In the Annual Review of Linguistics, psycholinguist Mark Antoniou of Western Sydney University in Australia outlines how bilingualism - as he defines it, using at least two languages in your daily life - might benefit our brains, especially as we age. This debate has been pitting linguists and psychologists against one another since the 1920s, when many experts thought that bilingual children were fated to suffer cognitive impairments later in life. More research on that issue is needed, according to the Mayo Clinic.CREDIT: JAMES PROVOST (CC BY-ND) Psycholinguist Mark Antoniou Some research suggests that being bilingual may also help stave off Alzheimer’s disease and dementia for a few years by keeping the brain nimble and increasing the amount of gray matter, though other studies have had conflicting results. In a previous study, Marian and her colleagues found that bilingual children were able to ignore classroom noise more easily than monolingual children. Knowing multiple languages may have other benefits, too. The new study added to the field by showing that the task of filtering information activates different brain areas in bilinguals and monolinguals, Abutalebi said. “There is actually a big discussion about whether the bilingual advantage exists or not,” said Jubin Abutalebi, a cognitive neurologist at the University San Raffaele in Milan, Italy. Most of the previous research on the benefits of bilingualism has focused solely on behavior, which has drawn criticism from some scientists. “But the bilingual is also stronger, because they’ve been mentally ‘working out’ like this for their whole life.”

“The bilingual has to lift more weight than the monolingual, because bilinguals experience competition within and between both their languages while listening to speech,” the researchers said in an e-mail. The researchers compared the task with lifting weights at a gym.

In other words, monolinguals’ brains had to work much harder to perform the task, the researchers said. The brains of people who spoke only one language lit up much more than those of their bilingual counterparts in regions involved in controlling higher-level functions, including suppressing competing word meanings. However, their brain activity was markedly different, the scans revealed. As fast as they could, the volunteers had to pick the picture that showed the word they heard.īilingual people were no faster at performing the task than monolinguals. For example, they might hear the word “cloud” and see pictures of a cloud, a clown and two other things. The researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to scan the brains of 17 people who were fluent in both Spanish and English and 18 who spoke only English.ĭuring the experiment, volunteers heard the name of an object and simultaneously were shown a picture of that object, as well as an object with a similar-sounding name, and two unrelated objects. In the new study, the researchers looked at how the ability to filter information manifests itself in the brain. In previous studies of people’s eye movements, Marian and her colleagues found that when bilingual people heard a word in one language, they often looked at objects whose names sounded similar to that word in their second language.

Bilingual vs monolingual brain