Does bilingualism influence cognitive aging?

Does Bilingualism Influence Cognitive Aging?

Recent evidence suggests a positive impact of bilingualism on cognition, including later onset of dementia. However, monolinguals and bilinguals might have different baseline cognitive ability. We present the first study examining the effect of bilingualism on later-life cognition controlling for childhood intelligence. We studied 853 participants, first tested in 1947 (age = 11 years), and ret...

Lifelong bilingualism maintains neural efficiency for cognitive control in aging.

Recent behavioral data have shown that lifelong bilingualism can maintain youthful cognitive control abilities in aging. Here, we provide the first direct evidence of a neural basis for the bilingual cognitive control boost in aging. Two experiments were conducted, using a perceptual task-switching paradigm, including a total of 110 participants. In Experiment 1, older adult bilinguals showed b...

Bilingualism, aging, and cognitive control: evidence from the Simon task.

Previous work has shown that bilingualism is associated with more effective controlled processing in children; the assumption is that the constant management of 2 competing languages enhances executive functions (E. Bialystok, 2001). The present research attempted to determine whether this bilingual advantage persists for adults and whether bilingualism attenuates the negative effects of aging ...

Does bilingualism delay dementia?

The Cognitive Science of Bilingualism

Symposium Presenters: Ton Dijkstra ([email protected]) Donders Centre for Cognition, Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands Laurie B. Feldman Department of Psychology, the University at Albany, SUNY & Haskins Labs, USA Ping Li ([email protected]) Department of Psychology, Pennsylvania State University, USA Li-Hai Tan ([email protected]) School of Humanities, State Key Lab of Brain and Cognitiv...