Ageing with bilingualism: benefits and challenges

ABSTRACT

Much of the world’s population speaks more than one language, and there has been a great deal of media attention given to the potential benefits of bilingualism. In this paper we provide a critical overview of the literature on bilingualism as it relates to older adults. We address whether there is indeed a cognitive advantage from speaking more than one language, and whether it can help preserve cognitive and linguistic function as we age, and potentially reduce the impact of dementia. We also focus on the patterns of language impairment after stroke (aphasia) in bilingual speakers and the issues relating to clinical management of bilingual aphasia.

KEYWORDS:

• Bilingualism
• ageing
• bilingual aphasia
• bilingual dementia
• cognitive reserve

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Lyndsey Nickels http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0311-3524

Britta Biedermann http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6242-1167

Notes

1 For conciseness, we will usually refer to speakers of more than one language as ‘bilinguals’ rather than, the more appropriate, multilingual or bilingual speakers. Unless specifically noted, or a point of contrast in the literature, we include within the scope of ‘bilinguals’, speakers of two languages and those who speak more than two.

2 Language Proficiency is usually defined as the extent to which a bilingual’s skills in one or both of their languages meet age-based native speaker or monolingual expectations. Proficiency has been defined relative to a monolingual speaker’s vocabulary size (Bialystok, Luk, Peets, & Yang, 2010) or grammatical skills (Windsor, Kohnert, Loxtercamp, & Kan, 2008).

3 For a very accessible discussion of language attrition see Monika Schmid’s website: languageattrition.org.

4 For discussion of how, in clinical setting, to support languages other than the dominant language of the community see, for example, Kohnert, Yim, Nett, Kan, and Duran (2005).

5 Unfortunately, these negative stereotypes are still around today. Consider for example the title of this recent paper ‘Multilingualism was associated with lower cognitive outcomes in children who were born very and extremely preterm’ (van Veen et al., 2018). Yet the children were compared on a test that would favour monolingual speakers (a Dutch assessment), unsurprisingly those children who spoke only another language at home, performed worse on this Dutch assessment.

6 Strauss (2015) noted that there is no surprise that this has not been done given the difficulty of designing and implementing such a study.

7 See Grosjean (1989) and Abutalebi et al. (2013) for a detailed account of how the social or interactional context of the language community affects bilinguals’ language control and cognitive abilities.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders [grant number CE110001021], Australian Research Council Future Fellowship [grant number FT120100102] to LN.