It might pay to learn another language today. According to a new research on stroke patients, those who speak more than one language are more likely to regain their cognition.
The study was conducted by Nizam Institute of Medical Sciences and Edinburgh University researchers among 608 stroke survivors in Hyderabad, where the institute is also located. The group chose the city because of the high cultural diversity, which means many of its residents are capable of speaking different languages. To ensure that the results can be attributed only to multiple languages, other factors such as high blood pressure and age were also taken into consideration during the analysis.
Among the survivors, at least 300 were bilinguals while more than 250 spoke only one language. However, once their medical data were analyzed, the researchers discovered that more of the bilinguals were able to recover their cognitive function than their monolingual counterparts. To be more specific, while less than 20% of the monolingual stroke victims restored their normal cognitive ability, it's twice the percentage among the bilinguals.
This study, which is the first to establish a connection between repair of cognition and multi-language proficiency, may illustrate the benefit of learning another language. Previous studies have already showed that multilingualism can decrease the risk of Alzheimer's disease, a common type of dementia, a degenerative brain disorder.
In this case, the difficulty of learning a new language provides brain training that may act as a protective mechanism against the negative impact of suffering from a stroke.
Nevertheless, the research has limitations. For example, the effects of speaking more than one language may be less evident among those who don't practice it on a regular basis. Second, there's no link between better cognition and multiple language among patients with aphasia or the tendency to jumble words.
The study is already available in the American Heart Association journal.
