“ suggest that bilingualism might have a stronger influence on dementia than any currently available drugs.”Īnother study, the findings of which appeared last year in the journal Neuropsychologia, also shed some light on why bilingualism might protect against cognitive decline.
The team noticed that in those who spoke a second language, dementia - referring to all three of the types that this study targeted - onset was delayed by as long as 4.5 years. In one such study, scientists from the University of Edinburgh in the United Kingdom and Nizam’s Institute of Medical Sciences in Hyderabad, India, worked with a group of people with Alzheimer’s disease, vascular dementia, or frontotemporal dementia. Multiple studies, for instance, have found that bilingualism can protect the brain against Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia. Share on Pinterest Being able to speak more than one language has protective effects on cognitive functioning. It seems that language-learning boosts brain cells’ potential to form new connections fast.
Moreover, a study previously covered by Medical News Today found evidence to suggest that the more languages we learn, especially during childhood, the easier our brains find it to process and retain new information. However, additional research shows that learning more languages - and learning them well - has its own effect on the brain, boosting the size and activity of certain brain areas separate from the traditional “language centers.”Ī study led by researchers from Lund University in Sweden found that committed language students experienced growth in the hippocampus, a brain region associated with learning and spatial navigation, as well as in parts of the cerebral cortex, or the outmost layer of the brain. If a person experienced a brain injury resulting in damage to one of these areas, it would impair their ability to speak and comprehend what is said. These are Broca’s area, tasked with directing the processes that lead to speech utterance, and Wernicke’s area, whose main role is to “decode” speech. that it is “referential,” meaning that “speakers use it to exchange specific information with each other about people or objects and their locations or actions”īut where, exactly, is language located in the brain? Research has identified two primary “language centers,” which are both located on the left side of the brain.that it is “compositional,” meaning that it “allows speakers to express thoughts in sentences comprising subjects, verbs, and objects”.
Pagel adds, human language has two distinctive characteristics. While other animals do have their own codes for communication - to indicate, for instance, the presence of danger, a willingness to mate, or the presence of food - such communications are typically “repetitive instrumental acts” that lack a formal structure of the kind that humans use when they utter sentences.īy contrast, Prof. Mark Pagel, at the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Reading in the United Kingdom, explains in a “question and answer” feature for BMC Biology, human language is quite a unique phenomenon in the animal kingdom.
When did spoken language first emerge as a tool of communication, and how is it different from the way in which other animals communicate?Īs Prof.