Article published In:
Bilingualism and Executive Function: An interdisciplinary approachEdited by Irina A. Sekerina and Lauren Spradlin
[Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism 6:5] 2016
► pp. 590–604
Edited by Irina A. Sekerina and Lauren Spradlin
[Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism 6:5] 2016
► pp. 590–604
Does bilingualism protect against cognitive aging?
Methodological issues in research on bilingualism, cognitive reserve, and dementia incidence
Recent studies of bilingualism as a protective factor in cognitive aging have reported conflicting findings, and researchers have begun to explore the methodological complications that may explain differences across studies. This article details the current research landscape and addresses several issues relevant to the study of bilingualism and late-life cognitive function: study design, establishing causal relationships, confounding factors, operationalizing bilingualism, predicting cognitive level versus cognitive change, and incorporating brain structural variables to interrogate cognitive reserve.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.The current research landscape of AD studies
- 3.Study design, causal inference, and confounding factors
- 4.Operationalizing bilingualism for research on cognitive aging and dementia
- 5.Predicting cognitive level versus age-related cognitive change
- 6.Incorporating brain structural variables
- 7.Summary and Methodological Recommendations
-
References
References (42)
Alladi, S., Bak, T.H., Duggirala, V., Surampudi, B., Shailaja, M., Shukla, A.K., Chaudhuri, J.R., & Kaul, S. (2013). Bilingualism delays age at onset of dementia, independent of education and immigration status. Neurology, 81 (22), 1938–1944. 
Allin, S., Masseria, C., & Mossialos, E. (2009). Measuring socioeconomic differences in use of health care services by wealth versus by income. American Journal of Public Health, 991, 1849–1855.
Bak, T. (2016). The impact of bilingualism on cognitive aging and dementia: finding a path through a forest of confounding variables. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism.
Bak T., & Alladi, S. (2016) Bilingualism, dementia and the tale of many variables: Why we need to move beyond the Western world. Commentary on Lawton et al. (2015) and Fuller-Thomson (2015). Cortex 741, 315–317.
Bak, T.H., Nissan, J.J., Allerhand, M.M., & Deary, I.J. (2014). Does bilingualism influence cognitive aging? Annals of Neurology, 751, 959–963.
Bialystok, E., Craik, F. I., & Freedman, M. (2007). Bilingualism as a protection against the onset of symptoms of dementia. Neuropsychologia, 451, 459–464.
Bialystok, E., Craik, F. I., Klein, R., & Viswanathan, M. (2004). Bilingualism, aging, and cognitive control: Evidence from the Simon task. Psychology and Aging, 191, 290–303.
Chertkow, H., Whitehead, V., Phillips, N., Wolfson, C., Atherton, J., & Bergman, H. (2010). Multilingualism (but not always bilingualism) delays the onset of Alzheimer disease: Evidence from a bilingual community. Alzheimer Disease & Associated Disorders, 24 (2), 118–125.
Craik, F. I., Bialystok, E., & Freedman, M. (2010). Delaying the onset of Alzheimer’s disease: bilingualism as a form of cognitive reserve. Neurology, 751, 1726–1729.
Crane, P.K., Gibbons, L.E., Arani, K., Nguyen, V., Rhoads, K., McCurry, S.M., Launer, L., Masaki, K., & White, L. (2009). Midlife use of written Japanese and protection from late life dementia. Epidemiology, 201, 766–774.
Farias, S.T., Mungas, D., Reed, B.R., Harvey, D., & DeCarli, C. (2009). Progression of Mild Cognitive Impairment to Dementia in Clinic- vs Community-Based Cohorts. Archives of Neurology, 66 (9), 1151–1157.
Fratiglioni, L, Paillard-Borg, S., & Winblad, B. (2004). An active and socially integrated lifestyle in late life might protect against dementia. Lancet Neurology, 3 (6), 343–353.
Fuller-Thomson, E. (2015). Emerging evidence contradicts the hypothesis that bilingualism delays dementia onset. A Commentary on “Age of dementia diagnosis in community dwelling bilingual and monolingual Hispanic Americans” by Lawton et al., 2015. Cortex, 661, 170–172.
Fuller-Thomson, E., & Kuh, D. (2014). The healthy immigrant effect may confound the link between bilingualism and delayed onset of Alzheimer’s disease. Cortex, 521, 128–130.
Fuller-Thomson, E., Nuru-Jeter, A., Richardson, D., Raza, F., & Minkler, M. (2013). The Hispanic Paradox and older adults’ disabilities: is there a healthy migrant effect?. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 101, 1786–1814.
Glymour, M. (2006). Using Causal Diagrams to Understand Common Problems in Social Epidemiology. In J. Oakes, & J. Kaufman (Eds.). Methods in Social Epidemiology (pp. 393–428). San Francisco: Wiley and Sons.
Gollan, T.H., Salmon, D.P., Montoya, R.I., & Galasko, D.R. (2011). Degree of bilingualism predicts age of diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease in low-education but not in highly educated Hispanics. Neuropsychologia, 491, 3826–3830.
Guzman-Velez, E., & Tranel, D. (2015). Does Bilingualism contribute to cognitive reserve? Cognitive and neural perspectives. Neuropsychology, 29 (1), 139–150.
Hill, T., Angel, J., & Balistreri, K. (2012). Does the ‘healthy immigrant effect’ extend to cognitive aging? In J. Angel, F. Torres-Gil, & K. Markides (Eds.). Aging, Health, and Longevity in the Mexican-Origin Population (pp. 19–33). New York: Springer.
Hinton, L., Franz, C.E., Yeo, G., & Levkoff, S.E. (2005). Conceptions of dementia in a multi-ethnic sample of family caregivers. Journal of American Geriatric Society, 53(8), 1405–1410.
Kaushanskaya M., & Prior A. (2015). Variability in the effects of bilingualism on cognition: it is not just about cognition, it is also about bilingualism. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 181, 27–28.
Kavé, G., Eyal, N., Shorek, A., & Cohen-Mansfield, J. (2008). Multilingualism and cognitive state in the oldest old. Psychology and Aging, 231, 70–79.
Kormi-Nouri, R., Shojael, R.S., Moniri, S., Gholami, A.R., Akbari-Zardkhaneh, S., & Nilsson, L.G. (2008). The effect of childhood bilingualism on episodic and semantic memory tasks. Scandinavian Journal of Psychology, 491, 93–109.
Kovács, Á.M., & Mehler, J. (2009). Cognitive gains in 7-month-old bilingual infants. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA, 1061, 6556–6560.
Lawton, D.M., Gasquoine, P.G., & Weimer, A.A. (2015). Age of dementia diagnosis in community dwelling bilingual and monolingual Hispanic Americans. Cortex, 661, 141–145.
Loizou, M., & Stuart, M. (2003). Phonological awareness in monolingual and bilingual English and Greek five-year-olds. Journal of Research on Reading, 261, 3–18.
Luk, G., & Bialystok, E. (2013). Bilingualism is not a categorical variable: Interaction between language proficiency and usage. Journal of Cognitive Psychology (Hove, England), 25 (5), 605–621.
Luk, G., Bialystok, E., Craik, F.I., & Grady, C.L. (2011). Lifelong bilingualism maintains white matter integrity in older adults. Journal of Neuroscience, 161, 16808–16813.
Manly, J.J., Jacobs, D.M., Touradji, P., Small, S.A., & Stern, Y. (2002). Reading level attenuates differences in neuropsychological test performance between African American and White elders. Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society, 81, 341–348.
Paap, K.R., Johnson, H.A., & Sawi, O. (2016). Should the search for bilingual advantages in executive function continue? Cortex, 741, 305–314.
Prior, A. & Gollan, T.H. (2011). Good Language-Switchers are Good Task-Switchers: Evidence from Spanish-English and Mandarin-English Bilinguals. Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society, 171, 682–691.
Sachdev, P. & Valenzuela, M. (2009). Brain and cognitive reserve. American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry, 17 (3): 175–178.
Sanders, A.E., Hall, C.B., Katz, M.J., & Lipton, R.B. (2012). Non-native language use and risk of incident dementia in the elderly. Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease, 291, 99–108.
Scaltritti, M., Peressotti, F., & Miozzo, M. (2015). Bilingual advantage and language switch: What’s the linkage?. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition.
Schweizer, T.A., Ware, J., Fischer, C.E., Craik, F.I., & Bialystok, E. (2012). Bilingualism as a contributor to cognitive reserve: evidence from brain atrophy in Alzheimer’s disease. Cortex, 48 (8), 991–996.
Stern, Y. (2002). What is cognitive reserve? Theory and research application of the reserve concept. Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society, 81, 448–460.
(2012). Cognitive reserve in ageing and Alzheimer’s disease. Lancet Neurology, 11 (11), 1006–1012.
Tao, L., Taft, M., & Gollan, T. (2015). The Bilingual Switching Advantage: Sometimes Related to Bilingual Proficiency, Sometimes Not. Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society, 211, 531–544.
Valian, V. (2014). Bilingualism and cognition. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 181, 3–24.
Yeung, C.M., St. John, P.D., Menec, V., & Tyas, S.L. (2014). Is bilingualism associated with a lower risk of dementia in community-living older adults? Cross-sectional and prospective analyses. Alzheimer Disease and Associated Disorders, 281, 326–332.
Yow, W.Q., & Li, X. (2015). Balanced bilingualism and early age of second language acquisition as the underlying mechanisms of a bilingual executive control advantage: why variations in bilingual experiences matter. Frontiers in Psychology, 61, 164.
Zahodne, L.B., Schofield, P.W., Farrell, M., Stern, Y., & Manly, J.J. (2014). Bilingualism does not alter age-related cognitive decline or dementia risk among Spanish-speaking immigrants. Neuropsychology, 281, 238–246.
Cited by (11)
Cited by 11 other publications
Elliott, Meghan R., Dan M Mungas, Miguel Arce Rentería, Rachel A. Whitmer, Charles DeCarli & Evan M Fletcher
2024. Bilingualism reduces associations between cognition and the brain at baseline, but does not show evidence of cognitive reserve over time. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition ► pp. 1 ff. 
Kim, Jihyun & Mi So Kim
2022. An Overview of Cognitive Reserve in Aging Based on Keyword Network Analysis. INQUIRY: The Journal of Health Care Organization, Provision, and Financing 59
Jafari, Zahra, Daniela Perani, Bryan E. Kolb & Majid H. Mohajerani
2021. Bilingual experience and intrinsic functional connectivity in adults, aging, and Alzheimer's disease. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1505:1 ► pp. 8 ff.
Surmont, Jill, Piet Van de Craen, Olga Kepinska, Maurits Van den Noort & Maurits Van den Noort
2021. Bilingual language control across modalities. In Psycholinguistic Approaches to Production and Comprehension in Bilingual Adults and Children [Benjamins Current Topics, 117], ► pp. 39 ff.
Rieker, Jennifer A., José Manuel Reales & Soledad Ballesteros
2020. The Effect of Bilingualism on Cue-Based vs. Memory-Based Task Switching in Older Adults. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 14
Mendez, Mario F.
2019. Bilingualism and Dementia: Cognitive Reserve to Linguistic Competency. Journal of Alzheimer's Disease 71:2 ► pp. 377 ff.
Mendez, Mario F.
2023. Can Speaking More Than One Language Help Prevent Alzheimer’s Disease?. Journal of Alzheimer's Disease 95:2 ► pp. 363 ff.
Mendez, Mario F., Diana Chavez & Golnoush Akhlaghipour
2019. Bilingualism Delays Expression of Alzheimer’s Clinical Syndrome. Dementia and Geriatric Cognitive Disorders 48:5-6 ► pp. 281 ff.
Struys, Esli, Jill Surmont, Piet Van de Craen, Olga Kepinska & Maurits Van den Noort
2019. Bilingual language control across modalities. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism 9:4-5 ► pp. 542 ff.
Reyes, Anny, Brianna M. Paul, Anisa Marshall, Yu‐Hsuan A. Chang, Naeim Bahrami, Leena Kansal, Vicente J. Iragui, Evelyn S. Tecoma, Tamar H. Gollan & Carrie R. McDonald
2018. Does bilingualism increase brain or cognitive reserve in patients with temporal lobe epilepsy?. Epilepsia 59:5 ► pp. 1037 ff.
Sekerina, Irina A. & Lauren Spradlin
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 21 october 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.