Bilingual Brains Perform Better in Older Age

Have the ability to speak two languages? Make sure you keep up your skills in both tongues, and your brain will thank you for it in later life, suggests new research.

• Past literature on the benefits of bilingualism for the adult brain is inconclusive.
• In this study, 60-84 year-olds who were bilingual in English and Chinese were given executive control tasks in which performance declines with age.
• Bilingualism with less frequent language switching predicted better performance in certain tasks.

The effort involved in not switching between languages and “staying” in the target language is more cognitively demanding than switching between languages while actively using both languages. Our study shows that the seniors developed more efficient neural organization at brain regions related to language control, which also overlap with areas involved in executive control.

Bilingual Brains Perform Better in Older Age. (2020). Retrieved 7 May 2020, from https://www.technologynetworks.com/tn/news/bilingual-brains-perform-better-in-older-age-334461

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