Bilingualism: Consequences for Mind and Brain

By Ellen Bialystok, Fergus I. M. Craik, G. Luk. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 2012

1,292 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Building on earlier evidence showing a beneficial effect of bilingualism on children’s cognitive development, we review recent studies using both behavioral and neuroimaging methods to examine the effects of bilingualism on cognition in adulthood and explore possible mechanisms for these effects. This research shows that bilingualism has a somewhat muted effect in adulthood but a larger role in older age, protecting against cognitive decline, a concept known as “cognitive reserve”. We discuss recent evidence that bilingualism is associated with a delay in the onset of symptoms of dementia. Cognitive reserve is a crucial research area in the context of an aging population; the possibility that bilingualism contributes to cognitive reserve is therefore of growing importance as populations become increasingly diverse.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Developmental and Educational Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8911f0125bda69df70a47658d37ee53d9db7ae4c

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Citations in the corpus

Bilingualism and cognition (2014, background): “Conflict monitoring has also been proposed (Bialystok et al., 2012), but some enriching experiences do not involve conflict monitoring in any obvious way.”
Executive control in bilinguals: A concise review on fMRI studies. (2016, positive): “…and colleagues considered these effects as evidence for a more distributed functional connectivity, which they linked to the documented structural connectivity, and they interpreted both effects as evidence for the ‘cognitive reserve’ associated with bilingual experience (Bialystok et al., 2012).”
Effects of dense code-switching on executive control (2016, background): “Code-switching involves two key processes: inhibitory control and conflict-monitoring of co-activated languages (Bialystok et al., 2012; Costa et al., 2009).”
Dual mechanisms of cognitive control in bilinguals and monolinguals (2013, background): “Our findings, however, join others to suggest that a better understanding of the benefits of being bilingual may be derived from considering how bilinguals adjust different executive control mechanisms (Bialystok et al., 2012; Costa et al., 2009).”
Bilingualism and working memory capacity: A comprehensive meta-analysis (2017, background): “There is a large literature on how bilinguals outperform monolinguals on a range of executive function tasks (for a review, see Bialystok et al., 2012), but until now, the effects of bilingualism on WM capacity were unclear.”
Moving toward a neuroplasticity view of bilingualism, executive control, and aging (2014, methodology): “As explicitly noted by virtually all players in the literature, including Bialystok and colleagues, bilingualism is not the only road to neuroplastic changes to executive control networks within the brain or to increased cognitive reserve (Bialystok et al., 2012).”
Bilingual advantages in executive functioning either do not exist or are restricted to very specific and undetermined circumstances. (2015, background): “In general, cortical areas shown to be involved in managing two languages overlap with those shown to be involved with inhibitory control and switching (Bialystok et al., 2012).”