This might be me being overly cautious here, but I would be wary of the political implications of the study.
It's from an open University that's a project for lifelong learning funded as a public service in Catalonia - promoting the catalan language in the region is a key point of the project, so studies finding out that bilingualism is something great to have raise red flags about the nationalist agenda behind it.
To be clear, I'm not trying to make a point against catalan people or taking a position in any political side whatsoever. I'm just pointing out the potential for local context affecting the scientific method here.
It is a common point of view from modern Catalan nationalism that the bilingual status-quo is conducive to the minoritization of the Catalan language long term. Bilingualism can also mean Catalan and English. On the other hand, pro-union parties [0] and organizations [1] often defend bilingualism under the opposite premise: that supposedly Catalan has an advantageous position over Spanish.
If you see past the rhetoric you will find that Catalan nationalists would like Catalan to be the dominant language in Catalonia while Spanish nationalists would like Spanish to be the dominant language instead. Neither of them are really concerned about English because English is not in a position to replace either Catalan or Spanish.
Replace "spanish nationalists" by "everybody else" and you have it. The idea that the main language of a nation, the only that everybody share and knows, should be deterred from part of the territory is surrealist.
It's not the meaning so much as the choice of prepositions. When you say "deter X from Y", usually Y is the thing being reduced/prevented and X is the actor who is now less likely to Y.
So the use of "[action] deterred from [region the action might occur in" was surprising and possibly incorrect. If you'd said "[...] deterred in [...]", it would have been perfectly grammatical English.
It's a weird nit to pick in such harsh language, especially on a comment section that's more likely than the typical HN comment page to attract people who are not native English speakers.
Definition of deter
transitive verb
1 : to turn aside, discourage, or prevent from acting
she would not be deterred by threats
2 : inhibit
painting to deter rust
I have also seen "crime" and "war" given in examples of sense 2. To "deter the language", in sense 2, would be to deter speakers from using the language. You can sort of unify the two senses by treating "rust" or "war" or "crime" as willful entities - but in that case I don't see a reason you couldn't do the same for a language.
Do you actually fail to understand what pvaldes was trying to communicate?
Well, I know the general idea that he's trying to convey, since it's the same sort of message that I read in the nationalist press (e.g. El Mundo) day in day out, but I think if you intend to have a productive discussion you have to talk precisely, otherwise it's a waste of time. To say that a language is being "deterred" is not precise, it's vague and confusing, even if not technically incorrect (although I doubt that).
In general, Catalan nationalists tend to see bilingualism as a process by which one language (Catalan) is gradually being supplanted by another (Spanish). They are not really advocates for bilingualism.
Weird to call it "Spanish". Catalan is also "Spanish" (though you'll find a very small number of speakers in Southern France). Usually Catalan is opposed to Castilian.
The common term for the language we're talking about here is Spanish (in the English language), which is a distinct language from Catalan. Catalan may originate in Spain (and thus could be called Spanish-the-adjective, though that doesn't seem terribly useful conversationally), but it is most definitely not a dialect of Spanish-the-language.
Castilian Spanish, when used in English, is often used to denote the dialects spoken in Spain, as opposed to the dialects spoken in Latin America. This is not the topic at hand here, so there isn't much point in calling it Castilian (especially since many English speakers would not be familiar with that term) over Spanish.
It would be interesting to see how the described effect depends on linguistic proximity. Does bilingualism of e.g. English and Chinese or German and Turkish protect better against cognitive decline than Castilian and Catalan?
That would be interesting. FWIW the US State Department has observed a factor of 3 difference in time to teach anglophones various languages (think dutch vs mandarin) to B2 level:
It's always good to be wary, but so far it seems that most studies in this area are in agreement, and that this phenomenon isn't specific to language, it seems to be the same for musicians.
So in theory you could potentially realize similar benefits without learning another spoken language.
By the same token, anyone claiming that this must be agitprop designed to promote a political agenda, is promoting their own agenda of nationalism.
Vielleicht sind die zweisprachigen Sprecher jedoch besser darauf vorbereitet, die Wahrheit zu finden: Sprache ist Politik - Es wird besser, je mehr Sie es verwenden.
> "The facts—man, happening, amount, place, time—are true in each case. They could be sworn to by the whole membership of an interfaith conference. But the interpretation placed on them—who communicates these facts to whom? why? when?—makes them into propaganda."
This study tries to explain why "some studies have failed to show this bilingual advantage, suggesting that it might depend on the type and degree of bilingualism", by laying out evidence for the "type and degree of bilingualism.
Here are the facts that the article established:
- Lifelong degree of bilingualism predicts delay in age of onset for all clinical measure of Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI).
- This is NOT true for Alzheimer's Disease patients.
- This prediction was independent of occupation, education, and job attainment.
The second bullet point isn't properly emphasized in the article, but it's directly from the abstract.
The researcher has a hypothesis that multilingualism improves Cognitive Reserve [1], and, and Cognitive Reserve has already been established to have an effect on the timeline of Alzheimer's disease related pathology. [2]
That being said, it's also true that "AD is the most common etiology of MCI and mild dementia" [3], and the researcher has a hypothesis that the multilingualism improves Cognitive Reserve.
Based on the existing hypothesis of how CR and AD interact, the lack of correlation in AD patients could make sense, and should not be seen as counter-evidence to the bilingualism increases CR hypothesis.
The title has been editorialized unfortunately. The page uses Actively speaking two languages protects against cognitive impairment which is an important summary of the paper: everyone in the study is basically bilingual, but the bilingual composite score (how bilingual you are / how much you actively speak and switch languages) is suggested as a precursor of delayed cognitive decline.
The title of the original paper is Active bilingualism delays the onset of mild cognitive impairment which is also clear, if a little stilted as a headline.
Ah thanks. We've changed the title now. Submitted title was "Dementia 50% lower in bilingual populations".
Submitters: please follow the site guidelines, which include: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize."
Seems like something that could easily have causation going the other way (or having a common cause) no? E.g. perhaps people who end up having cognitive impairment stop regularly speaking both languages because it's harder to do so when suffering cognitive decline.
Simply my own thoughts, but I think any cognitive activity that is intensely practiced protects against cognitive impairment.
My grandmother reads a lot of novels, including quite complicated ones and does a lot of language puzzles, yet only knows one language. I'm sure that if she would only watch television and not read a lot of (medieval-based) novels and language puzzles, then she will experience cognitive decline earlier in her life.
I think the mantra "use it or lose it" is quite true in nature, in general.
That study might be not support the wild conclusion in the title.
They determined fluency in two languages (Spanish and Catalan) in people hospitalized in and around Barcelona. There are some hard-core Catalans that hardly --or even refuse to-- speak Spanish there, but not that many in Barcelona, but there are (many) people from other regions in Spain who are not fluent in Catalan, because they started working and living there a long time ago, when speaking Catalan simply was not needed, or perhaps still forbidden. These will be older, poorer and more frequently hospitalized. So they might simply be looking at two very different groups. Not a word about that in the abstract. I can't access the article.
If actively speaking two languages has an influence, I wouldn't expect much of a difference between Spanish and Catalan: they are close enough to be seen as dialects. They should test this on e.g. English/Urdu speakers or Hungarian/Rumanian.
Interesting and suggestive, but difficult to interpret from the publicly available information. Actively speaking two languages no doubt implies complex correlations between wealth, status and circumstance.
The paper abstract doesn't mention controlling for location. That would also be an interesting thing to test.
I got that. I was responding to someone saying speaking 2 languages correlates with wealth. I'm not sure how true that is as being bilingual is extremely common outside of the US.
Some googling suggests that about half the world population is bilingual. Certainly more than the rate in the US, but it's a bit of an exaggeration to imply that everyone in the world is bilingual except for the backwards Yanks.
Interestingly, my mother started learning a foreign language recently and it got me thinking. Is anyone here well versed in the state of the art of brain plasticity? I always wondered if you could slow down Alzheimer's disease by trying to "outpace" the brain decline by forming new connections at a faster pace. Learning a language was the first thing that came to mind.
I'd also be very interested in a comparison of two language vs. three language. Switzerland would be the obvious choice but children from partners that don't speak the same language and use English as a lingua franca or Canadians with one extra language (Chinese living in Canada etc.) should provide a big enough sample.
This is pseudo-science. Please refrain from upvoting.
You cannot prove (or imply) causation via observation. The only method we know to find causation is by setting up an experiment. This study however merely measures variables in a pre-existing context, without injecting independent variables. The only valid result you may extract from this is a correlation, never causation.
Please edit the title to reflect correlation or (IMO preferred) delete the submission, because such bad science surely does not pass the quality barrier of HN.
Protection is a term of art and doesn't deduce causality...
> This is pseudo-science. Please refrain from upvoting.
You cannot prove (or imply) causation via observation. The only method we know to find causation is by setting up an experiment. This study however merely measures variables in a pre-existing context, without injecting independent variables. The only valid result you may extract from this is a correlation, never causation.
> Please edit the title to reflect correlation or (IMO preferred) delete the submission, because such bad science surely does not pass the quality barrier of HN.
If I say "vegetables save you from cancer" that implies a causation, wouldn't you agree? Just because it does not explicitly say "cause" it still very clearly says "if you do X, Y will happen". Why do you think this is not applicable?
It means that when the term is used professionally in literature, it doesn't mean to suggest a deduction of causality.
Also, causal deduction is not the only way to arrive at a competent causal theory; humans and animals do it all the time, and they do it to such proficiency that it cannot be explained by a methodical process of causal deduction.
I keep saying that brain grows (BDNF, brain-derived neurotrophic factor is released into blood) when body encounter evolutionary familiar stress - hunger, need for endurance and need for force exertion. Basically, brain was made for body to experience less of that stress.
As an example of what BDNF does: endurance exercise is known for elevating serum BDNF levels long-term [1] and endurance exercise has been shown to help with Parkinsons' [2].
Thus, can it be that these speaking two languages experience more of that stresses thorough their life? The article does not suggest that these factors were, well, factored out.
I understand the concerns about p-value but the causal pathway is such a clear one (make brain work harder each day and it stays elastic and effective longer) that this should be a slam dunk for more research grants
I don't know - that's why I think more funding is needed. Directing that funding against likely targets seems a sensible idea.
Until someone finds some bacterial or pathogen cause for Alzheimer's and dementia, funding should go on the "we don't use it we lose it" assumption. Yes there may be other factors of course, and given the surprise over stomach ulcers it's entirely possible the use it or lose it idea is wrong.
But science funding needs to be a smart money play not a scattergun.
Scientists like to measure natural language against dementia probably because its easier to do then some other form of knowledge (like being good in multiple disciplines).
From the practical standpoint, learning more then 1 one language doesn't make any sense - practical value you get from it is next to 0 compared to for example learning medicine, electronics, IT, math etc.
Especially because it requires the same amount of time.
> From the practical standpoint, learning more then 1 one language doesn't make any sense - practical value you get from it is next to 0 compared to for example learning medicine, electronics, IT, math etc.
That may be true if you're living in a country where English is the main language, otherwise adding English has a lot of practical value.
Or, if you're not a native English speaker who moves to another country where English is not the main language then adding that language tend to have a lot of practical value.
> [...] practical value you get from it is next to 0 compared to for example learning medicine, electronics, IT, math etc.
Source missing. Seriously though, you sound very certain of your claim so let me at least offer a counterpoint, however anecdotal.
I've had tons of practical value out of some of my language skills. I would not have the career I have today if I hadn't learned English as a second language. Admittedly my third language, German, was a bust, but I blame the way schools teach language for that (grammar, grammar, grammar). My fourth language, Thai, OTOH was a great investment not only because it made it possible for me to be self-sufficient and socialize (and make friends) while living in Thailand, it also was so different from the previous languages I knew that I could feel my mind expanding. Finally, I've also cracked my head at (Mandarin) Chinese but in that case the practical value has been much closer to 0 but it at least made it possible for me to travel around China on my own, which was well worth it at the time for me.
Almost everyone is bilingual in Barcelona. They teach Catalan and Spanish at school, and both are spoken by the general population. How did they get non-bilingual people there?
"Therefore, unlike in previous studies, the researchers established a bilingualism gradient: from people who speak only one language but are passively exposed to another, to individuals who have excellent proficiency in both and use them indiscriminately on a day-to-day basis. To create this gradient, several variables were taken into account, including the age of acquisition of the second language, the use made of each language, and switching between languages in the same context."
Table 1 shows various demographic factors broken down by disease vs no disease.
But since they're making claims about bilingualism vs no bilingualism, we also need to see a "Table 1" equivalent for those two categories, so we can understand at a glance which confounders are correlated with these values.
Secondarily, it's a bit concerning (for their hypothesis) that bilingualism is associated with less mild cognitive impairment but not with the more severe dementia phenotype.
Learning a new language is often accompanied by the very real feeling of your "mind expanding." I think that's because being able to understand/speak another language is almost like experiencing a whole new world; another rich set of culture, people, literature, etc different from yours suddenly become very much accessible.
The Wittgenstein adage
> The limits of my language mean the limits of my world
This paper suggest causal effect but they have nothing but correlation. There may be other factord at play between people who are bilingual and those who are not. Would be surprising to say the least that one variable explains differences in dementia outcomes...
> They recruited 63 healthy individuals, 135 patients with mild cognitive impairment such as memory loss, and 68 people with Alzheimer's – the most prevalent type of dementia – in four hospitals in Barcelona and the metropolitan area
Cue “p = 0.05 is a random choice” and a big thread about p-hacking. Any takers?
It feels like everything to say has already been said about the bias of small sample sizes and the dangers of p-hacking. But it also seems like the discussion is inevitable here.
I wonder if there’s a new insight to glean, somehow...
For a background on why p-values are misleading, see https://youtu.be/42QuXLucH3Q which is excellent. He points out that 0.05 was selected by Ronald Fischer in 1925, and people have gone with it since.
The reason we have stuck with it ever since it s because it's a decent cutoff. I think in physics they sometimes use a much higher threshold of 5 sigma. Presumably because having much more data means they can afford to.
Isn't the crux just that, "proper random sampling" can be quite hard. Assumptions are fine in theory, in reality, they can seriously throw us for a loop.
Right, so you really need to review the study's methodology to determine if N = 266 is actually enough or not. I am guessing my original parent did not conduct such a review.
I'm not sure which side to take on this issue. I think both can be right, but I lean towards agreement with the root comment.
Root parent comment is right to question if the N=266 is truly random given the description we do have at hand.
You are right to say N=266 could be truly random and we don't have enough information to definitively decide either way.
We can't read the study so it's just what we have - saying you have a truly random sample with a group just from Barcelona is extremely hard to accept. I mean even you've got to admit that.
It seems that his objection is he "homogeneity" of the population, they're all from Barcelona, if the sample had different locations I think he wouldn't object the small number( e.g N = 30 ).
Also, you only need about 400 samples for 95% confidence on a proportion at the highest variance point of p1 = .
0.50. It used to drive me nuts when my CEO used to say “10 clicks out of 10,000 on this A/B test is in the noise”. No, that’s not in the noise, it’s almost certainly a clickthrough rate of close to 0.
> With proper random sampling you only need something like N = 27 (I forget exactly) to reach p = 0.05
will be difficult to demonstrate that they can control for all individual differences at n=266 to prove differences in dementia outcomes are linked to a single variable.
Assuming you take 27 people from all over the world at random, and all 27 of them have two legs, you can be fairly certain that most humans have two legs. You might also conclude that about 50% are male and about 60% are from Asia, but as traits get less frequent your error bars get bigger and bigger.
Of course actually picking 27 random people is extremely hard, so actual studies compensate by picking more people.
Random does not mean that it's enough to do a proper group comparison, because individual differences, genetics, lifestyle, etc... are additional factors to take in account for dementia related outcomes.
Your mixing up your statistics. Perfect random sampling of a normal distribution means you can sample 27 times and your statistical analysis is close to that of the entire population.
It's highly dependent on the magnitude of the effect (when comparing two populations) and the distribution across a population.
For something dementia, where even measuring the level of cognitive decline is highly subjective, no way N=27 would be enough.
As long as measurement errors are not significantly correlated with the tested "cause"/category, it should not have significant bearing on the results or their validity. In such a case, 27 individuals should be sufficient.
That being said, article mentions 63+135+68 individuals in 4 hospitals in a single city.
Yes, I haven’t read the paper but how can you control for correlated stuff here, e.g. bilingual people are likely to be richer, more intelligent, exercise more, eat better more varied food and have richer social lives. Maybe.
This is why they chose Barcelona, where the use of 2 languages (Catalan and Spanish) was "highly variable" and everyone in the city spoke or at least understood 2 languages:
"We wanted to take advantage of this variability, and instead of comparing monolingual and bilingual people, we looked at whether in Barcelona – where everyone is more or less bilingual – there was a certain degree of bilingualism that had neuroprotective benefits."
I think this doesn’t disprove the theory I’ve set out that people who know more languages than the average local population are likely to have other markers correlated with lower Alzheimer’s risk.
It's not about knowing more languages (I would be surprised to learn that they only knew two, after all it's Europe). This paper instead studies differences between people who actually use multiple languages, against people who don't.
There's still corellation here, like professions where the lingua franca isn't the local language (programming, medicine, music (to some degree), sciences, etc). The paper claims the effect appears equally strong in all occupations though.
Very obvious propaganda to promote an agenda, not more, not less.
And don't make me start to talking about how normal is the mental health of the same people that trashed and burned Barcelona last years, because they felt "oppressed" by a man that died 30 years before they born. Or the lobby trying to erase the history claiming than Leonardo Da Vinci, Cervantes and "put your name here" were really from Catalonia. Very sane behavior, for sure.
Trust me (or your gut if you prefer). You can find crazy people equally among bilingual, monolingual, translingual and people with just mischieving tongues. Just take a look at how mental asylums are distributed.
This is just one of thousands of articles that support a patriotic narrative so are published. Is politics disguised as science. The opposite idea would never reach the journals.
Between Catalan, Basque, and Galician, many people in Spain are bilingual (if not trilingual since English is quite common). Rich, poor, intelligent, idiot, etc.
Have you got a source for any of that? I imagine a lot of demographic factors could confound such a study, but I don’t see why multilingual people would be richer/healthier/more educated. In a lot of western countries, I’d imagine a huge amount of the multilingual population would be made of less well off immigrants.
the working class tend to be multilingual - nurses, deliverymen, (food) hawkers, construction workers, odd-job labourers. when you think of someone who has to juggle multiple languages - mandarin, cantonese, malay, tamil, a smattering of english - often as a necessity, it's someone who's had to hustle at the lower rungs of society.
the educated class tend to be monolingual - researchers, policy makers, lawyers, bankers - they've only ever had to operate in environments where the only language used is english.
I’m pretty sure the only places where being monolingual is common, are the countries where English is the dominant language. If you look at the whole population of the world, it’s more common to know more than one language than it is to know only one. If you’re born in a place that speaks a language other than English, then learning English is very common, and a lot of places (like Singapore) have multiple common languages, where people often speak more than one. Singaporeans will tend to speak English, and the language of their ethnic heritage. Plenty of Malaysians speak Malaysian and Chinese or English. Most people in Indonesia speak Indonesian and their local regional language. A lot of people in India speak their regional language and English or Hindi...
I’m not sure it’s a sign of social status in English speaking countries. The wealthier you are, the more you can just expect everybody around you to speak English. Where I live, the most common language I’d expect somebody to know besides English is Spanish, and the local Spanish speaking population isn’t known for their excessive wealth.
No. In backwater countries like Poland English is caught at school, but people don't speak or write in it. Many still prefer polish-language media because LACK CONFIDENCE in their english. It typically goes like "Oh, I had English 4 years ago at school, I'm not that good". You use English skills to read a label on a shampoo or an instruction manual. English is not spoken or even written regularly. Before the pandemic I even played board games with lots of people younger than me, largely university students, and there's visible hesitation to use an untranslated game.
There is some evidence that Poland was spared from XIII black plague, and - so far - relatively unaffected - by the covid19 pandemic - because it lies off the main transport and travel routes.
In Poland, most movies have a Polish voice-over. If you see someone using subtitles, you can be pretty sure he's a cinema fan. Back in the transitional period after 1989 it was common to find english labels on imported goods, but not anymore. Everything except radio music is translated.
I’m not sure what you think you’re going to prove by point out one example (which you yourself describe as being a comparatively isolated country).
The total population of multilingual people is obviously quite hard to measure. But every study I’ve seen has put it above 50% of the worlds population, with English being the most common second language choice. EU stats on Poland say 1/4 of its population speak a second language well enough to hold a conversation, with the most popular languages being English, German and Russian, in that order.
I used the weasel words "so far". It's more like 2400 at the moment. The fact that the epidemic develops later supports my statement that Poland is a backwater country. Which doesn't mean it will go around us.
The R (effective reproduction rate) coefficient is between 1.3 and 1.5 depending on the interval chosen, which is a very worrying trend. But remember Italy was 4.5 in February. Of course, if they cook books to hide financial deficit they sure can fake infection stats.
While sampling equally from different income groups might clear up these variables, from what I've been able to find some of highest rates of dementia are in relatively small rich European countries.
Those countries have longer life expectancies so it's hard to do apples-to-apples for rich countries to poor countries.
I do think the "use it or lose it" model for neurodegeneration makes a lot of sense, in the same way you lose muscles if you don't use them, so bilingual is an interesting proxy for greater brain use. Although I also think the lack-of-sleep model makes sense too so I really don't know.
There would need to be research done, nothing has been said if these people were all immigrants to Barcelona or the wages they were on, my guess is they are probably not truly random and replication will be difficult if we chose say bilingual in Wales, for example.
There is not reason to think that inmigrant population is over-represented in the hospitals. Would be more logical to expect the opposite, in fact, as some immigrants could be more reluctant to go to the hospitals.
- What says Lord Stanley? will he bring his power?
- My lord, he doth deny to come.
- Off with his son George's head!
in the original Klingon. Pursuing the synergy-recognising creative destruction of a Stanley[1] is no doubt in the wheelhouse of some on on the Forbes list.
If I were to immigrate to Barcelona I would learn (Galician) Spanish, but perhaps not Catalan. (Though it’s a beautiful language.) I guess I would count as monolingual in their study.
You can speak Spanish tainted by Galician words and modisms also. Is very common in Spanish speakers. The whole communication can be a 90% spanish and 10% Galician (or the opposite).
How do we know the cognitive impairment isn't causing people to not speak two languages (despite knowing two - as in they can't remember one of them), long before other symptoms appear? The only way to test that is to split a pool of bilingual people into two groups, and forbid one group from using one language. Was that done?
I saw a few comments here commenting this. It's a strange perspective to me. The people I know who are bilingual still prefer one language and use the other primarily to speak to people who don't know their primary language.
As an example I am Swedish but fluent in English and Dutch. In my family we use a mix of Swedish and Dutch. But I use Swedish exclusively with anyone else who is Swedish unless someone is in the conversation who only knows English. I have both friends and colleagues who don't speak Swedish (nor Dutch) and I always speak Dutch with my wife's family.
In this context it makes little sense that I'd simply stop using multiple languages, since then I'd be unable to speak to parts of my family, friends, and coworkers.
The methodology reminded me of Feynman's story about the "Young's 1937 rats study". The conclusions could have been better supported with simpler yet better methodology (given that, of course, from the nature of subject under study it can only reveal correlations, and could fail to detect unknown confounding factors).
They could have actually gone to hundreds of elderly homes in Barcelona or, for that matter, better, in places where everyone is mostly actively bilingual (central/north Catalonia?) and regions where people are mostly monolinguals (Castille?) and requested anonymized data from medical records with that information (actively spoken languages vs. mental condition), or if that information was not available, to actually request it to be collected across all these centers, and then establish much stronger correlations.
edit: I originally wrote "the methodology was unnecessarily weak for the conclusions", which was wrong to say from my side. We cannot always do what would be best but must do with what is available to us.
If I'm not mistaken, speaking two languages in Spain is quite common. The country has multiple languages besides Spanish [1]. So I guess it doesn't correlate with much aside from the geographic region.
Speaking three is common, but there is often an appreciable and even obvious erosion in the mastery of some of them (limited vocabulary, misspellings..., mobile phones made lot of damage also in this field). We need to be aware of this point also
Having a logically structured thinking or being good in math (all related with having dementia or not) does not depend on how many times you can say 'street' in different languages.
Most of the world's population is multilingual [1], hence it doesn't correlate with much anything on a wider scale. The list of multilingual areas is very long and nuanced [2] and the implications and correlations in each location are as widely varied as the list itself.
As other commenters have already pointed out, the study took place in Barcelona, where multilingualism is prominent and doesn't correlate with any specific group or trait.
I can think of many cities (even in Europe) where many people are fully bilingual (in the Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland, Sweden, Finland, in some regions of Italy, Austria and Croatia, etc...) - and if we go outside of Europe, well, in India, Ghana, Paraguay, etc... (just to select one instance across other continents), well, I'd say that bilingualism (or multilingualism) is almost a norm...
Yes, that’s true. I only meant that in the western developed world, Montreal and Barcelona are the only cities I can think of where the vast majority of people have native (or virtually so) proficiency in more than. One language.
Do team shooters have discussion beyond simple imperatives?
(I've learned a fair amount of spanish from sports, very little of which I could ever use in polite company. A few years ago I met someone's parents, and although I hear about mothers all the time on the pitch, it was memorable as the first time I'd been introduced to a real one.)
I cant find the episode now, but a few years ago an episode CBC's science show Quirks and Quarks interviewed a researcher that found being bilingual seemed to delay the onset of dementia by a couple of years. Although it doesnt sound like much, from a public policy pov, its pretty significant when you look at what that can mean for quality of life as well as costs for our public health system.
Unfortunately, you can't take an 50-something english only American and tell him to "go learn Italian", for health. It's hard enough to make people eat less, exercise, or quit smoking - picking up new language without another motivation than "for health" is going to be even harder.
Most schools introduce more languages today, no ? And I guess there is no motivation to keep language skills active beyond school, so any skill here will likely atrophy like me French :(
its been a while since I heard the doc, but I dont think it was so much a "lets all learn another language" as opposed to looking what might be happening in the brain to cause such an odd disparity in how the disease manifests itself.
I wonder if knowing one language delays the onset of dementia by X.
then being bilingual delays dementia by X/2.
then being trilingual delays dementia by X/3.
and so on ...
I wonder if actively used bureaucratese is far enough from Standard English to count as second lect? "In view of the somewhat nebulous and inexplicit nature of your remit, and the arguably marginal and peripheral nature of your influence within the central deliberations and decisions within the political process, there could be a case for restructuring their action priorities in such a way as to eliminate your liquidation from their immediate agenda."
It's from an open University that's a project for lifelong learning funded as a public service in Catalonia - promoting the catalan language in the region is a key point of the project, so studies finding out that bilingualism is something great to have raise red flags about the nationalist agenda behind it.
To be clear, I'm not trying to make a point against catalan people or taking a position in any political side whatsoever. I'm just pointing out the potential for local context affecting the scientific method here.