Bilingualism: the new fountain of youth?

Little did College junior Robby Snitkof realize that, when he began studying Spanish, he may have been staving off some of the perils of old age.

A study by York University Psychology professor Ellen Bialystock published in this month's Journal of Neuropsycologia suggests that individuals who are bilingual can offset the symptoms of dementia by up to four years.

"My belief is that these benefits come from thinking and engaging the cognitive systems" involved with speaking two languages, Bialystock said.

A renowned expert in bilingual studies, Bialystock said she used data compiled from patients who had dementia and were bilingual and proceeded to find the age for the onset of the disorder.

"This is one of the first studies that proves what researchers long suspected - that there are cognitive benefits to bilingualism," Penn Linguistics professor Gillian Sankoff said.

But unfortunately, it might already be too late for Snitkof, who didn't pick up Spanish until he was 12.

Bialystock emphasized that all of her subjects in the study had been speaking more than one language for their entire lives.

It is not known if individuals who gain fluency at the university level will receive the cognitive benefits found through her study.

But regardless of the psychological perks, Bialystock believes that learning language at any stage of life is important.

"The cognitive benefits are only a bonus to the insight, perspective and tolerance gained from learning languages," she said.

And if you weren't speaking Spanish in diapers, both Bialystock and Sankoff said living in a foreign country may be the next best thing.

"Immersion plus good instruction is the best way to learn a language" Sankoff said.

Bialystock said that bilingualists do face difficulties reading slower and with their vocabulary in both languages, but she cautioned that there is "no reason to think [being bilingual] is a disadvantage."

Education goes a long way towards offsetting those problems, so much so that educated bilingualists show no observable difference compared to monolinguists, Bialystock said.

Snitkof, who is a Spanish major, characterizes the results of the study as "encouraging" and said that the positive news is a welcome change from the usual negative feedback he receives for majoring in a language.

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