KITV – Martha Shade
“Bialystok believes the experience of using two languages effectively reorganizes your brain. “So that means the more experience with bilingualism leads to greater changes. The longer you’re bilingual, the more the changes. The earlier you start being bilingual, the more the changes. The more intense your bilingual experience is on a daily basis, the more the changes.” “When you’re bilingual,” Gollan explains, “you can’t turn one language off, so you’re constantly having to face choices that monolingual speakers don’t have to make. So in addition, you have to ‘work hard’ to be bilingual.” People who are highly educated, or people who have very demanding jobs, might have similar benefits with later onset of Alzheimer’s disease. They still get the disease, but all that hard work their brains did over the years makes it more resilient, for longer.” (more)