Introduction: Studies suggest bilingualism may delay behavioral manifestations of adverse cognitive aging including Alzheimer's dementia.
Methods: Three thousand nine hundred sixty-three participants (unweighted mean population age ≈56 years) at Hispanic Community Health Study/Study of Latinos baseline (2008-2011) self-reported their and their parents' birth outside the United States, Spanish as their first language, and used Spanish for baseline and comparable cognitive testing 7 years later (2015-2018). Spanish/English language proficiency and patterns of use were self-rated from 1 = only Spanish to 4 = English > Spanish. Cognitive testing included test-specific and global composite score(s) of verbal learning, memory, word fluency, and Digit Symbol Substitution (DSS). Survey linear regression models examined associations between baseline bilingualism scores and cognition.
Results: Higher second-language (English) proficiency and use were associated with higher global cognition, fluency, and DSS at follow-up and better than predicted change in fluency.
Discussion: The bilingual experience was more consistently related to 7-year level versus change in cognition for Hispanics/Latinos.
Download full-text PDF |
Source |
|---|---|
| http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9797616 | PMC |
| http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/alz.12703 | DOI Listing |
Publication Analysis
Top Keywords
Similar Publications
Individual differences in the distributional learning and overnight consolidation of the Mandarin level-falling tone contrast.
J Acoust Soc Am
December 2024
Division of Humanities, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Clear Water Bay, Kowloon, Hong Kong.
In perceptual studies, musicality and pitch aptitude have been implicated in tone learning, while vocabulary size has been implicated in distributional (segment) learning. Moreover, working memory plays a role in the overnight consolidation of explicit-declarative L2 learning. This study examines how these factors uniquely account for individual differences in the distributional learning and consolidation of an L2 tone contrast, where learners are tonal language speakers, and the training is implicit.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSelective attention in cognitive processing revisited: A Long-term Re-evaluation.
Brain Lang
December 2024
York University, Canada. Electronic address:
The volume by Harris (1992) was published at a time when research on the cognitive effects of bilingualism was in its infancy. In this article I revisit the chapter I contributed to that volume and evaluate the extent to which the arguments presented there remain valid. Specifically, I review three claims I made, namely, that the effects of bilingual experience extend into nonverbal domains, that these effects were continuous in nature and not categorical, and that selective attention was the key to explaining cognitive change in bilinguals.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAdapting Advance Care Planning Interventions for Hispanic Communities Across the U.S.
Am J Hosp Palliat Care
December 2024
Penn State College of Medicine, Hershey, PA, USA.
Context: Health inequities in Hispanic populations require community-engaged solutions. Engaging Hispanic communities in research related to advance care planning (ACP) is critical to inform the development and evaluation of culturally appropriate interventions.
Objectives: To understand how to best adapt and implement Spanish-language ACP interventions in Hispanic communities across the US.
Toward characterization of perceptual specialization for faces in Multiracial contexts.
Front Psychol
December 2024
Department of Linguistics, University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA, United States.
This conceptual analysis focuses on opportunities to advance research and current hypotheses of perceptual development by examining what is presently known and unknown about perceptual specialization in a Multiracial context during the first year of life. The impact of being raised in a Multiracial family or community is discussed to further characterize the development of perceptual expertise for faces and languages. Historical and present-day challenges faced by researchers in defining what race is, identifying Multiracial individuals or contexts, and how to study perceptual and cognitive processes in this population are discussed.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFRevisiting the 40-Hz gamma response: Phase-locked neural activity along the human auditory pathway relates to bilingual experience.
Brain Lang
January 2025
Connecticut Institute for the Brain and Cognitive Sciences, University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT 06269, USA. Electronic address:
Spoken language experience influences brain responses to sound, but it is unclear whether this neuroplasticity is limited to speech frequencies (>100 Hz) or also affects lower gamma ranges (∼30-60 Hz). Using the frequency-following response (FFR), a far-field phase-locked response to sound, we explore whether bilingualism influences the location of the strongest response in the gamma range. Our results indicate that the strongest gamma response for bilinguals is most often at 43 Hz, compared to 51 Hz for monolinguals.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWant AI Summaries of new PubMed Abstracts delivered to your In-box?
Enter search terms and have AI summaries delivered each week - change queries or unsubscribe any time!