By: Merel Keijzer
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If there is one thing that this website hopes to achieve is to communicate to parents and to professional caregivers that there are many advantages to raising your child bilingually. Not only does having access to another language provide access to another culture, but bilingual speakers are also known to have better developed cognitive abilities. And this especially becomes apparent when they reach an advanced age.
We now know from cognitive aging research that certain cognitive changes occur as we get older and these changes are mostly not very positive. Chemically, the white matter that can be found in our brain decreases as we age, effectively leaving us with a smaller brain. What is more, similar chemical changes cause neurons to fire less easily, so we get slower. These two processes, in addition to other physical changes in different brain regions, can be noticeable in the form of a number of general age-related deficits: elderly people are generally slower, suffer from declining working memories (which basically means they can process and store new incoming information less efficiently) and may also find it difficult to ignore irrelevant information (inhibition problems).
These changes also typically impact on language. Elderly people tend to find it difficult to understand speeded speech, go off topic in conversations, find it difficult to comprehend and produce complex (mostly long) sentences and often experience word finding difficulties or pick the wrong word given a certain context.
But bilinguals, or early bilinguals at least (people who grew up with two languages from birth or from a very early age onwards), do not seem to show these signs of decline so much. Instead, they benefit from lifelong brain training that has come about by constantly having to juggle two languages. As they speak one language, they have to suppress the other and that takes quite some effort; so much so that they have better developed working memories, and enhanced brain areas that govern inhibition processes. In other words, as bilinguals age they don’t show as many problems understanding speeded speech or sticking to one conversational topic, nor do they have overt problems producing and understanding long and complex sentences and they don’t have to search for words as often as people who only speak one language. Perhaps the most striking finding to have emerged from cognitive aging research is that bilinguals can delay the onset of dementia by four years.
Within the field of cognitive aging the term successful aging is very popular and refers to those people who show relatively few signs of the age-related decrements discussed above. Crucially, one of the major factors contributing to successful aging is bilingualism.
See also: Being bilingual ‘boosts brain power’
