Learning a second language can improve your work skill or your travel experience, but new research is showing that it also appears to confer other, unexpected advantages: It actually makes the brain more healthy and more efficient.

In presentations at the AAAS Annual Meeting, researchers detailed findings that show that learning a second language can sharpen focus and other cognitive abilities and even hold off the effects of dementia.

An episode of Science Podcast, hosted by Robert Frederick, tapped into two symposia at the meeting, one focused on the advantages of learning more than one language, and the other on the science that can be applied to building a corps of multi-lingual diplomatic, security and other workers.

Frederick’s take-home: Being multilingual can actually influence learning and the brain structure, with impacts extending throughout one’s life.

Evidence that exposure to multiple languages changes behavior is evident soon after birth, said psychologist Janet F. Werker, director of the Infant Studies Centre at the University of British Columbia. Research has traced the roots of “perceptual attentiveness” to early infancy, she said; babies exposed to more than one language show an “ability to switch attention and focus on the properties of each of two languages simultaneously.”

Now spin that forward and see it from the perspective of someone who’s hiring an employee for work in foreign countries.

Linguist Amy S. Weinberg, deputy executive director at the Center for Advanced Study of Language at the University of Maryland-College Park, says it’s possible to identify strong candidates for language training by assessing factors such as “auditory acuity” and the skill of “switching from task to task while remaining in focus.”

In non-scientific terms, that suggests an enhanced strength and adaptability in the wiring of a person who speaks more than one language. That informal conclusion was underscored in the symposium on what brain researchers learn from bilinguals.

“Speaking more than one language protects the brain against cognitive decline and makes a person better at multi-tasking,” said a report by Karin Zeitvogel for Agence France-Presse.
Her story continued: “Being bilingual, or even learning a second language late in life, has been shown to slow the decline of some key brain functions, said Ellen Bialystok of York University in Canada... A study co-authored by Bialystok found that people who spoke more than one language were diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease 4.3 years later and reported the onset of symptoms 5.1 years later than monolingual patients.”

Christine Dell'Amore, writing for National Geographic online, added in her account that “studies are revealing that advantages of bilingualism persist into old age, even as the brain's sharpness naturally declines.”

Bialystok, a psychologist, and her colleagues examined 211 Alzheimer’s patients; all had the same level of mental acuity, but 102 had long been bilingual and 109 had not, Dell’Amore wrote. “The bilingual patients had been diagnosed with the Alzheimer's about four years later than the monolingual patients, on average, according to Bialystok's most recent study, published in November in the journal Neurology.”

In an interview with Science Update, the daily 60-second radio show from AAAS, Bialystok said: “We don’t believe bilingualism prevents Alzheimer’s disease. What we’re saying is, people who have been bilingual have more reserve, they have more resources to continue functioning at a high level in spite of the disease progressing in their brains.”

Alok Jha, writing for the Guardian, said Bialystok also found that “bilingual children who use their second language regularly are better at prioritising tasks and multitasking compared with monolingual children.”