Bilingualism protections against dementia and attention/cognitive problems

Some very interesting research coming out of Baycrest in Toronto in the February issue of Neuropsychologia. Essentially they examined the age of Dementia onset between monolingual and bilingual clients, finding that the bilingual group had a significantly later onset of the disorder. Mini-Mental (MMSE) and demographic characteristics (gender, age, education level) were not significantly different between the two groups.

This is one of several bilingualism studies that have been carried out at Baycrest of late including one that found decreased attention and cognitive difficulties in bilingual children and adults (note: I have not had a chance to review the cognitive/attention research but will post a review shortly).

Interestingly the results were based on an essentially eastern European language sample (25 languages with the highest prevalence of Polish, Yiddish, German, Romanian and Hungarian). I would be interested myself in seeing a anglophone / francophone / bilingual comparison.

You can CLICK HERE to read a review of the article.

The long and the short of it is that myself as a monolingual anglophone appears to be doomed! :)

Challenging Dyslexia Theories - New Ideas

Interesting article came out this week discussing new theories of Dyslexia that look at the role of distraction and attentional difficulties in high noise environments. You can find a very interesting overview of the recent batch of literature by CLICKING HERE. It's a short article and should definitely be read. I had a case just last week that this seems remarkably applicable towards.

I will track down the references for other articles it discusses and post them shortly for your information as well.