New study on Multiple sclerosis and bilingualism
The Association of Multiple Sclerosis in Madrid published an interview about a recent study on Multiple sclerosis and bilingualism that was conducted by a consortium of researchers from Spain, the United Kingdom, and Germany, including members of the Centre for Multilingualism at the University of Konstanz Germany.
Summary
Bilingualism has been suggested to be beneficial for executive control and could have positive long-term effects by delaying the onset of symptoms of degenerative diseases. This research investigated for the first time the impact of bilingualism on monitoring and inhibitory control in individuals with Multiple Sclerosis (MS), a neurodegenerative disease which commonly causes deficiencies in the cognitive system. Bilingual and monolingual adults, with and without an MS diagnosis, performed a flanker task in two degrees of monitoring demands (high monitoring vs. low monitoring). Results showed that bilingual MS patients had similar inhibitory control and monitoring abilities to healthy bilingual controls. In contrast, monolingual MS patients showed similar inhibitory control but significantly worse monitoring abilities compared to monolingual healthy controls. The authors propose that the similar behaviour between bilingual groups suggests that bilingualism might counteract cognitive deficits related to MS, especially with respect to monitoring. The high monitoring cost observed in monolingual patients seems related to underlying deficits in the monitoring and possibly switching, executive control abilities commonly impaired in MS patients from early stages. These findings provide some preliminary evidence for the cognitive reserve hypothesis in bilingual MS patients.
The full reference of the paper is:
Aveledo, F., Higueras, Y. Marinis, T., Bose, A., Pliatsikas, C., Meldaña-Rivera, A., Martínez-Ginés, M. L., Manuel García-Domínguez, J., Lozano-Ros, A. Cuello, J. P., & Goicochea-Briceño, H. (2021). Multiple sclerosis and bilingualism: some initial findings. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, 11 (4), 551-577. 10.1075/lab.18037.ave