1 00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:08,120 Welcome to the Language Neuroscience Podcast. 2 00:00:08,120 --> 00:00:10,080 This is episode 36. 3 00:00:10,080 --> 00:00:13,880 I have an amazing guest today, but first quickly I have a favor to ask. 4 00:00:13,880 --> 00:00:17,600 I know that some people have used the Language Neuroscience Podcast for teaching. 5 00:00:17,600 --> 00:00:21,400 If you've done so, could you kindly shoot me a quick email describing how? 6 00:00:21,400 --> 00:00:24,600 smwilson@uq.edu.au. 7 00:00:24,600 --> 00:00:27,560 You know how academia is, sometimes you need to document things. 8 00:00:27,560 --> 00:00:32,640 Okay, my guest today is Ellen Bialystok, Distinguished Research Professor of Psychology 9 00:00:32,640 --> 00:00:35,360 at York University in Toronto, Canada. 10 00:00:35,360 --> 00:00:38,720 Ellen is a phenomenally productive and highly influential researcher 11 00:00:38,720 --> 00:00:42,280 who has spent five decades investigating how speaking two languages 12 00:00:42,280 --> 00:00:45,960 shapes cognitive processes and brain structure across the lifespan. 13 00:00:45,960 --> 00:00:49,240 She's looked from early childhood through aging and dementia. 14 00:00:49,240 --> 00:00:52,200 She's especially well-known for her research findings that bilingualism 15 00:00:52,200 --> 00:00:55,360 confers cognitive advantages, particularly in aging, 16 00:00:55,360 --> 00:00:57,320 and may be protective against dementia. 17 00:00:57,320 --> 00:00:59,360 We're going to discuss all of this today. 18 00:00:59,360 --> 00:01:00,840 All right, let's get to it. 19 00:01:00,840 --> 00:01:02,600 Hi, Ellen, how are you? 20 00:01:02,600 --> 00:01:05,080 Hi, Stephen. Thank you for inviting me. 21 00:01:05,080 --> 00:01:09,480 Oh, yeah, it's really great to have a chance to talk with you. 22 00:01:09,480 --> 00:01:11,800 So, let's get started. 23 00:01:11,800 --> 00:01:14,920 I often like to find out about people's background 24 00:01:14,920 --> 00:01:18,200 and what led them into the kind of researcher that they've become. 25 00:01:18,200 --> 00:01:20,120 And you're particularly interesting, right? 26 00:01:20,120 --> 00:01:23,040 You've made your career studying bilingualism. 27 00:01:23,040 --> 00:01:25,800 Made your name is the world's strongest proponent 28 00:01:25,800 --> 00:01:29,560 of the hypothesis that bilingualism confers a cognitive advantage. 29 00:01:29,560 --> 00:01:32,920 And you come from a very famously bilingual country. 30 00:01:32,920 --> 00:01:36,680 So I'm curious about your own experiences with languages. 31 00:01:36,680 --> 00:01:39,720 What led you to this area of study? 32 00:01:39,720 --> 00:01:45,320 Okay, so I think the assumption in your question is that people choose 33 00:01:45,320 --> 00:01:48,920 what they're going to study, and I'm not sure I agree with that. 34 00:01:48,920 --> 00:01:54,680 I don't-- I didn't ever choose this, but you go one step 35 00:01:54,680 --> 00:01:59,240 in front of the other, and the path takes you there. 36 00:01:59,240 --> 00:02:03,720 So, I was always-- as long as I could remember-- 37 00:02:03,720 --> 00:02:08,440 as a little kid, I was interested in the relationship 38 00:02:08,440 --> 00:02:09,880 between language and thought. 39 00:02:09,880 --> 00:02:13,920 I thought this was just the most baffling question. 40 00:02:13,920 --> 00:02:20,440 And I remember thinking when I was a little kid or wondering, 41 00:02:20,440 --> 00:02:24,840 if you can't speak English, can you think? 42 00:02:24,840 --> 00:02:27,560 I thought, I mean, that was, I was little, OK? 43 00:02:27,560 --> 00:02:30,880 So that was the sort of thing that was always on my mind. 44 00:02:30,880 --> 00:02:36,280 And I didn't ever choose the particular path, 45 00:02:36,280 --> 00:02:41,480 but I did make small decisions that take you to where you are. 46 00:02:41,480 --> 00:02:43,440 So, for example, I entered university. 47 00:02:43,440 --> 00:02:44,960 I studied psychology. 48 00:02:44,960 --> 00:02:47,600 It was a good thing for girls to do. 49 00:02:47,600 --> 00:02:52,280 I was interested in language. 50 00:02:52,280 --> 00:02:57,400 My graduate work was all on language acquisition in children. 51 00:02:57,400 --> 00:03:02,480 But again, from the perspective of language and thought, 52 00:03:02,480 --> 00:03:05,640 as they're learning words, do they already 53 00:03:05,640 --> 00:03:08,720 have the concepts, or does learning the word 54 00:03:08,720 --> 00:03:10,960 create an opportunity for the concept? 55 00:03:10,960 --> 00:03:14,600 Really the same question I had when I was like six. 56 00:03:14,600 --> 00:03:17,080 And now I was studying it as a graduate student. 57 00:03:17,080 --> 00:03:19,800 I was interested in that. 58 00:03:19,800 --> 00:03:22,680 But bilingualism wasn't a field. 59 00:03:22,680 --> 00:03:26,480 And it certainly wasn't anything on my radar. 60 00:03:26,480 --> 00:03:31,200 And so, the way I got into bilingualism 61 00:03:31,200 --> 00:03:34,920 was more a series of accidents. 62 00:03:34,920 --> 00:03:37,680 And once I started looking at bilingualism, 63 00:03:37,680 --> 00:03:39,960 in fact, I didn't start with bilingualism. 64 00:03:39,960 --> 00:03:44,720 I started with second language acquisition. 65 00:03:44,720 --> 00:03:47,840 Okay. And then it's just accidents all the way down. 66 00:03:47,840 --> 00:03:48,760 It's not turtles. 67 00:03:48,760 --> 00:03:50,400 It's accidents. 68 00:03:50,400 --> 00:03:53,880 So, when I got my PhD, there were no jobs. 69 00:03:53,880 --> 00:03:56,720 There were no academic positions anywhere. 70 00:03:56,720 --> 00:04:02,440 I ended up getting a job as a project director on a study 71 00:04:02,440 --> 00:04:05,120 that was already funded. 72 00:04:05,120 --> 00:04:08,280 It had no room for input. 73 00:04:08,280 --> 00:04:12,880 I was supposed to manage the project. 74 00:04:12,880 --> 00:04:18,440 And the project was a study of high school students 75 00:04:18,440 --> 00:04:23,000 in Ontario learning French as a second language. 76 00:04:23,000 --> 00:04:24,640 That was the study. 77 00:04:24,640 --> 00:04:27,120 The methodology was determined. 78 00:04:27,120 --> 00:04:29,440 The measures were determined. 79 00:04:29,440 --> 00:04:32,600 I was just supposed to manage it. 80 00:04:32,600 --> 00:04:36,880 But I'm not very good at following instructions. 81 00:04:36,880 --> 00:04:40,200 And so, I really didn't like this project. 82 00:04:40,200 --> 00:04:42,560 I mean, I really didn't like it. 83 00:04:42,560 --> 00:04:48,360 And it was really the most formative thing that ever happened 84 00:04:48,360 --> 00:04:51,080 because I had never read any of the literature 85 00:04:51,080 --> 00:04:53,160 on second language acquisition. 86 00:04:53,160 --> 00:04:55,600 So, I had to absorb all that. 87 00:04:55,600 --> 00:04:59,680 I had to somehow fulfill the mandate 88 00:04:59,680 --> 00:05:02,480 of this funded research project. 89 00:05:02,480 --> 00:05:03,520 Yep. 90 00:05:03,520 --> 00:05:07,200 But in my spare time, I was doing side projects. 91 00:05:07,200 --> 00:05:09,480 So, I was running little experiments 92 00:05:09,480 --> 00:05:14,200 on second language acquisition as I was going through this. 93 00:05:14,200 --> 00:05:18,080 So that got me into the world of second language acquisition 94 00:05:18,080 --> 00:05:20,040 and applied linguistics. 95 00:05:20,040 --> 00:05:22,040 And then from there, you just move around. 96 00:05:22,040 --> 00:05:24,920 And things become interesting. 97 00:05:24,920 --> 00:05:27,040 And you follow that lead. 98 00:05:27,040 --> 00:05:31,040 And one thing leads to the next. 99 00:05:31,040 --> 00:05:31,800 Right. 100 00:05:31,800 --> 00:05:32,760 Oh, that's fascinating. 101 00:05:32,760 --> 00:05:35,440 Yeah, I didn't mean to imply that we 102 00:05:35,440 --> 00:05:37,160 choose our field of study. 103 00:05:37,160 --> 00:05:40,760 But yes, what's the path that gets us there? 104 00:05:40,760 --> 00:05:45,000 And everybody's got a unique path. 105 00:05:45,000 --> 00:05:48,280 So, you started out studying, 106 00:05:48,280 --> 00:05:51,600 did you use those high schoolers in your earliest experiments, 107 00:05:51,600 --> 00:05:52,480 In the…? 108 00:05:52,480 --> 00:05:53,120 Oh, yeah. 109 00:05:53,120 --> 00:05:54,440 Yeah, that's where it started. 110 00:05:54,440 --> 00:05:58,520 And I was trained as a developmental psychologist. 111 00:05:58,520 --> 00:06:01,440 So, when I did get an academic position, 112 00:06:01,440 --> 00:06:02,880 I cycled back to that. 113 00:06:02,880 --> 00:06:06,040 And my research became more firmly grounded 114 00:06:06,040 --> 00:06:10,640 in developmental psychology, child development, 115 00:06:10,640 --> 00:06:14,160 some language acquisition, but not only language acquisition. 116 00:06:14,160 --> 00:06:17,040 So, I did that for a long time. 117 00:06:17,040 --> 00:06:20,440 And then bilingualism just kind of crept in accidentally. 118 00:06:20,440 --> 00:06:24,800 I don't even know if I can recall the moment. 119 00:06:24,800 --> 00:06:30,160 I suddenly realized that you could just study bilingualism. 120 00:06:30,160 --> 00:06:30,760 Right. 121 00:06:30,760 --> 00:06:34,320 But your earliest major works in bilingualism 122 00:06:34,320 --> 00:06:37,600 were in the language acquisition space, right? 123 00:06:37,600 --> 00:06:38,680 Yeah. 124 00:06:38,680 --> 00:06:40,760 Well, they were, 125 00:06:40,760 --> 00:06:45,480 I mean, I never thought of myself as a language acquisition 126 00:06:45,480 --> 00:06:50,200 researcher in the usual sense, because I'm not a linguist. 127 00:06:50,200 --> 00:06:53,200 And I think you need to know a lot more about linguistics 128 00:06:53,200 --> 00:06:58,880 than I do, to do justice to those processes. 129 00:06:58,880 --> 00:07:04,000 So, I came at it from psychology, psycholinguistics. 130 00:07:04,000 --> 00:07:07,640 We can wave your hands at grammatical structures 131 00:07:07,640 --> 00:07:11,120 and not be expected to take them too seriously, 132 00:07:11,120 --> 00:07:14,160 as I say, psycholinguists. 133 00:07:14,160 --> 00:07:15,880 And so that was always my approach. 134 00:07:15,880 --> 00:07:21,760 Well, but increasingly, if I were doing this now, 135 00:07:21,760 --> 00:07:28,240 I think a much better firmer knowledge of linguistics 136 00:07:28,240 --> 00:07:30,080 would have been important. 137 00:07:30,080 --> 00:07:30,880 Oh, I don't know. 138 00:07:30,880 --> 00:07:32,920 Sometimes I feel like it can be an impediment. 139 00:07:32,920 --> 00:07:35,120 I mean, Roger Brown, Roger Brown, right, 140 00:07:35,120 --> 00:07:36,240 was a psychologist. 141 00:07:36,240 --> 00:07:40,520 And he did the most innovative studies 142 00:07:40,520 --> 00:07:43,200 on early language acquisition, syntax in particular. 143 00:07:43,200 --> 00:07:46,720 And I actually find when I read his stuff, 144 00:07:46,720 --> 00:07:49,040 it's almost his naivety that makes it good, 145 00:07:49,040 --> 00:07:51,880 because he comes at it as an amateur, and he's just like, 146 00:07:51,880 --> 00:07:54,080 oh, wow, grammar, like, oh, what's up with that? 147 00:07:54,080 --> 00:07:57,440 And he almost approaches it as a child himself, 148 00:07:57,440 --> 00:07:59,880 you feel when I read his book. 149 00:07:59,880 --> 00:08:02,200 And it led him to think, oh, what would a child actually 150 00:08:02,200 --> 00:08:04,080 need to get this? 151 00:08:04,080 --> 00:08:04,880 Do you know what I mean? 152 00:08:04,880 --> 00:08:06,600 Absolutely, absolutely right. 153 00:08:06,600 --> 00:08:09,400 But he never would have called himself a linguist. 154 00:08:09,400 --> 00:08:10,320 No, of course not. 155 00:08:10,320 --> 00:08:11,160 That's what I'm saying. 156 00:08:11,160 --> 00:08:13,320 He's in the psychology department. 157 00:08:13,320 --> 00:08:16,800 I mean, his work is so foundational. 158 00:08:16,800 --> 00:08:21,120 Everything we know about children's language acquisition 159 00:08:21,120 --> 00:08:25,960 somehow comes back to his work, and his students, 160 00:08:25,960 --> 00:08:29,560 and those three little kids who are learning English. 161 00:08:29,560 --> 00:08:30,400 Exactly. 162 00:08:30,400 --> 00:08:31,960 So yeah, I mean, he was a psychologist, right? 163 00:08:31,960 --> 00:08:32,800 Definitely not a linguist. 164 00:08:32,800 --> 00:08:35,360 So, maybe it's OK. 165 00:08:35,360 --> 00:08:37,960 So, you know-- 166 00:08:37,960 --> 00:08:40,280 I don't know that he was a social psychologist. 167 00:08:40,280 --> 00:08:42,560 He wasn't even a cognitive psychologist. 168 00:08:42,560 --> 00:08:42,760 Yeah. 169 00:08:42,760 --> 00:08:48,440 He was a social psychologist, which is pretty incredible. 170 00:08:48,440 --> 00:08:50,800 Yeah, so I think it's OK that you came to bilingualism 171 00:08:50,800 --> 00:08:53,440 as a psychologist and not as a linguist. 172 00:08:53,440 --> 00:08:53,960 Thank you. 173 00:08:53,960 --> 00:08:58,280 But when you were probably starting out, 174 00:08:58,280 --> 00:09:01,560 certainly, in the earlier in the 20th century, 175 00:09:01,560 --> 00:09:05,000 there was a widespread belief that bilingualism was detrimental 176 00:09:05,000 --> 00:09:07,080 to kids. 177 00:09:07,080 --> 00:09:10,640 Was that view still prevalent when you got into this field 178 00:09:10,640 --> 00:09:13,880 or started to create this field? 179 00:09:13,880 --> 00:09:16,960 So that line, that particular line, 180 00:09:16,960 --> 00:09:21,120 I can track it pretty closely to what's going on 181 00:09:21,120 --> 00:09:24,200 and the people who were major players in that. 182 00:09:24,200 --> 00:09:26,920 People talk about the turning point 183 00:09:26,920 --> 00:09:31,160 being the 1962 study out of Montreal, 184 00:09:31,160 --> 00:09:35,440 where Wally Lambert and Elizabeth Peal 185 00:09:35,440 --> 00:09:41,600 tried to bring some methodological rigor to the question 186 00:09:41,600 --> 00:09:45,080 and see what's really going on. 187 00:09:45,080 --> 00:09:50,320 And their famous result is that the bilingual kids 188 00:09:50,320 --> 00:09:54,680 were better on both verbal and nonverbal tasks. 189 00:09:54,680 --> 00:09:55,880 That's so. 190 00:09:55,880 --> 00:09:58,560 There is no, 191 00:09:58,560 --> 00:10:02,200 the previous people in the first half of the century, 192 00:10:02,200 --> 00:10:06,640 they called it mental retardation from bilingualism. 193 00:10:06,640 --> 00:10:08,160 They talked like that. 194 00:10:08,160 --> 00:10:09,160 Yeah. 195 00:10:09,160 --> 00:10:12,000 Peal and Lambert said there's nothing of the kind. 196 00:10:12,000 --> 00:10:14,760 In fact, the bilinguals are better. 197 00:10:14,760 --> 00:10:15,840 So, what did Peal and Lambert... 198 00:10:15,840 --> 00:10:17,600 Except they're wrong, sorry. 199 00:10:17,600 --> 00:10:19,640 I was going to say, what did they do differently 200 00:10:19,640 --> 00:10:20,560 to reach that conclusion? 201 00:10:20,560 --> 00:10:21,920 Well, they did a lot that was different, 202 00:10:21,920 --> 00:10:23,480 but there were problems in their study. 203 00:10:23,480 --> 00:10:26,520 And in fact, I recently published a paper with a couple 204 00:10:26,520 --> 00:10:32,280 of my students where we did a deep dive into the Peal 205 00:10:32,280 --> 00:10:34,600 and Lambert paper. 206 00:10:34,600 --> 00:10:40,160 And their conclusions were not right. 207 00:10:40,160 --> 00:10:44,080 The interpretation of the study and its place 208 00:10:44,080 --> 00:10:47,800 in this history is not right. 209 00:10:47,800 --> 00:10:51,360 And yet, without them, we wouldn't be where we are. 210 00:10:51,360 --> 00:10:55,200 So, we can tolerate a few errors to get 211 00:10:55,200 --> 00:10:59,000 to this more elevated point. 212 00:10:59,000 --> 00:11:02,800 Here is what was going on. 213 00:11:02,800 --> 00:11:08,320 All of the research, all of the research up to and including 214 00:11:08,320 --> 00:11:14,640 Peal and Lambert was based on standard IQ tests. 215 00:11:14,640 --> 00:11:20,320 And their description, their definition of intelligence 216 00:11:20,320 --> 00:11:24,680 was, it's your score on an IQ test. 217 00:11:24,680 --> 00:11:29,680 So, up to that point, people were giving intelligence tests 218 00:11:29,680 --> 00:11:33,760 verbal and nonverbal to kids who were monolingual 219 00:11:33,760 --> 00:11:35,320 or bilingual. 220 00:11:35,320 --> 00:11:38,760 And the bilingual kids did more poorly. 221 00:11:38,760 --> 00:11:41,320 Lots of reasons they did more poorly. 222 00:11:41,320 --> 00:11:42,240 They were immigrants. 223 00:11:42,240 --> 00:11:44,640 They didn't know the language the test was in. 224 00:11:44,640 --> 00:11:47,240 There were socioeconomic differences. 225 00:11:47,240 --> 00:11:48,600 There were all sorts of reasons. 226 00:11:48,600 --> 00:11:52,120 They did more poorly, that were never documented. 227 00:11:52,120 --> 00:11:56,400 So, one thing Peal and Lambert were really careful about, 228 00:11:56,400 --> 00:12:00,760 they thought, was matching the monolinguals and bilinguals 229 00:12:00,760 --> 00:12:03,600 on all of these extraneous factors 230 00:12:03,600 --> 00:12:07,320 like socioeconomic status and so on. 231 00:12:07,320 --> 00:12:10,400 So, they gave these carefully matched kids. 232 00:12:10,400 --> 00:12:12,120 They were 10 years old. 233 00:12:12,120 --> 00:12:15,080 These tests, the bilinguals did better. 234 00:12:15,080 --> 00:12:22,640 Now, score on an IQ test is interesting. 235 00:12:22,640 --> 00:12:25,760 But it's really just a score on a test. 236 00:12:25,760 --> 00:12:29,760 What happened afterwards when I started working 237 00:12:29,760 --> 00:12:38,040 in the area, in the '70s was not measuring kids on standard IQ 238 00:12:38,040 --> 00:12:44,040 tests, but on their performance on cognitive tasks. 239 00:12:44,040 --> 00:12:47,080 So how do you get from standard IQ tests 240 00:12:47,080 --> 00:12:50,280 to cognitive tasks with bilinguals? 241 00:12:50,280 --> 00:12:51,800 It was The Bridge. 242 00:12:51,800 --> 00:12:54,360 And I was very involved in The Bridge. 243 00:12:54,360 --> 00:13:00,000 The Bridge was once it became acceptable, 244 00:13:00,000 --> 00:13:02,320 and there's a lot of reasons they used IQ tests, 245 00:13:02,320 --> 00:13:06,920 once it became acceptable to not just use IQ tests 246 00:13:06,920 --> 00:13:10,480 to measure kids, the next chunk of research 247 00:13:10,480 --> 00:13:13,240 was on metalinguistic awareness, 248 00:13:13,240 --> 00:13:17,200 which is the perfect bridge between the two worlds. 249 00:13:17,200 --> 00:13:19,920 My hypothesis made sense. 250 00:13:19,920 --> 00:13:23,680 If bilingual kids were going to be better at anything, 251 00:13:23,680 --> 00:13:27,560 they would have better understanding of intuition 252 00:13:27,560 --> 00:13:33,320 about and awareness of language, because they spoke two of them. 253 00:13:33,320 --> 00:13:37,480 So that was the bridge between the IQ testing, which 254 00:13:37,480 --> 00:13:41,200 essentially ended with Peal and Lambert, 255 00:13:41,200 --> 00:13:44,160 and the actual cognitive tasks that didn't begin 256 00:13:44,160 --> 00:13:46,960 until really the '80s. 257 00:13:46,960 --> 00:13:51,320 So, it was that metalinguistic transition 258 00:13:51,320 --> 00:13:58,600 that started showing actual performance advantages 259 00:13:58,600 --> 00:14:00,920 for bilingual kids. 260 00:14:00,920 --> 00:14:01,640 OK. 261 00:14:01,640 --> 00:14:05,000 And do you think that the main flaw of the IQ tests 262 00:14:05,000 --> 00:14:09,080 was that, they were too influenced by language differences? 263 00:14:09,080 --> 00:14:12,200 And you needed to get away from language, 264 00:14:12,200 --> 00:14:15,960 or was it that you actually needed to focus on specifically 265 00:14:15,960 --> 00:14:16,920 they were, 266 00:14:16,920 --> 00:14:18,760 what was different about their language? 267 00:14:18,760 --> 00:14:21,360 Well, I think the first thing is you 268 00:14:21,360 --> 00:14:25,800 got to understand why this was happening. 269 00:14:25,800 --> 00:14:28,160 And it's not pretty. 270 00:14:28,160 --> 00:14:32,240 Why were people in the first half of the last century 271 00:14:32,240 --> 00:14:34,400 giving IQ tests to everybody? 272 00:14:34,400 --> 00:14:37,160 And who was behind it? 273 00:14:37,160 --> 00:14:39,920 It was the eugenicists. 274 00:14:39,920 --> 00:14:47,880 It was all followed from these really 19th century racist ideas. 275 00:14:47,880 --> 00:14:52,240 So, the 19th century eugenicists, people like Francis 276 00:14:52,240 --> 00:14:56,340 Galton and Paul Broca, they were really 277 00:14:56,340 --> 00:15:03,200 committed to this race intelligence equation. 278 00:15:03,200 --> 00:15:05,240 And they spent their careers trying 279 00:15:05,240 --> 00:15:07,280 to show how to prove it. 280 00:15:07,280 --> 00:15:09,440 So, they had these crazy ideas. 281 00:15:09,440 --> 00:15:12,920 They would do things like measure head circumference 282 00:15:12,920 --> 00:15:17,000 because bigger heads have bigger brains and bigger brains 283 00:15:17,000 --> 00:15:18,040 are smarter. 284 00:15:18,040 --> 00:15:22,880 They did all of this crazy stuff to prove their point. 285 00:15:22,880 --> 00:15:29,080 And then, in the early 1900s, Lewis Terman comes up 286 00:15:29,080 --> 00:15:31,360 with a scientific tool. 287 00:15:31,360 --> 00:15:33,480 You don't have to measure people's heads. 288 00:15:33,480 --> 00:15:35,480 You just give them this test. 289 00:15:35,480 --> 00:15:37,360 And then you know how smart they were. 290 00:15:37,360 --> 00:15:40,960 And Terman was a fellow traveler. 291 00:15:40,960 --> 00:15:44,520 He was a eugenicist just like the rest of them. 292 00:15:44,520 --> 00:15:50,400 So, the first IQ test, the Binet-Stanford IQ test, 293 00:15:50,400 --> 00:15:59,640 was that it was just leapt upon as the tool 294 00:15:59,640 --> 00:16:06,560 that would allow these people to prove their horrible ideas. 295 00:16:06,560 --> 00:16:08,840 That's why kids were given IQ tests 296 00:16:08,840 --> 00:16:11,500 because they were immigrants because they 297 00:16:11,500 --> 00:16:15,960 were racially different, all kinds of reasons. 298 00:16:15,960 --> 00:16:18,120 So that's why they were given these IQ tests. 299 00:16:18,120 --> 00:16:21,560 And they were given these tests without any attention 300 00:16:21,560 --> 00:16:24,160 to whether or not they spoke the language 301 00:16:24,160 --> 00:16:26,920 in which the questions were written. 302 00:16:26,920 --> 00:16:30,720 So, there wasn't, I don't want to go on about this too much. 303 00:16:30,720 --> 00:16:33,280 I mean, I find this history fascinating. 304 00:16:33,280 --> 00:16:37,840 There was one woman who was at Columbia University, 305 00:16:37,840 --> 00:16:38,920 who got it right. 306 00:16:38,920 --> 00:16:41,920 Name is Natalie Darcy. 307 00:16:41,920 --> 00:16:47,680 And during the '40s and '50s, she was giving IQ tests 308 00:16:47,680 --> 00:16:52,360 to kids, fully understanding everything I'm telling you. 309 00:16:52,360 --> 00:16:57,480 And she published some data from her own PhD, 310 00:16:57,480 --> 00:16:59,400 but then wrote two major reviews. 311 00:16:59,400 --> 00:17:03,840 And her conclusion was that if you give these kids 312 00:17:03,840 --> 00:17:08,480 these standardized tests, there will be no difference 313 00:17:08,480 --> 00:17:14,640 between monolingual and bilingual kids on nonverbal tests. 314 00:17:14,640 --> 00:17:18,760 But monolinguals will do better on verbal tests. 315 00:17:18,760 --> 00:17:21,920 And she was exactly right. 316 00:17:21,920 --> 00:17:24,880 So, the Peal and Lambert study didn't show that. 317 00:17:24,880 --> 00:17:26,000 Why not? 318 00:17:26,000 --> 00:17:30,880 So, in this review I do, if the paper I pull out some possible 319 00:17:30,880 --> 00:17:33,280 reasons why they got different results. 320 00:17:33,280 --> 00:17:37,840 The right result is, no difference on nonverbal tests. 321 00:17:37,840 --> 00:17:40,840 But monolinguals do better on verbal tests. 322 00:17:40,840 --> 00:17:42,600 Yeah, oh, that's fascinating. 323 00:17:42,600 --> 00:17:45,520 I mean, I'm glad you went back to this history 324 00:17:45,520 --> 00:17:49,160 because I also am a huge history of science buff. 325 00:17:49,160 --> 00:17:52,520 So, I always love to start with those foundational studies. 326 00:17:52,520 --> 00:17:54,760 Yeah, shame about the Broca contribution 327 00:17:54,760 --> 00:17:56,840 that you alluded to there. 328 00:17:56,840 --> 00:18:00,280 But yeah, so, you're making this interesting point here 329 00:18:00,280 --> 00:18:03,000 that you're kind of well associated 330 00:18:03,000 --> 00:18:05,040 with the concept of a bilingual advantage. 331 00:18:05,040 --> 00:18:06,320 But you're saying here, actually there's 332 00:18:06,320 --> 00:18:10,320 a subtle bilingual disadvantage on verbal tests. Right? 333 00:18:10,320 --> 00:18:14,640 So, bilingualism is a very good thing in many ways, 334 00:18:14,640 --> 00:18:18,200 but it's not 100% a free lunch, right? 335 00:18:18,200 --> 00:18:19,840 Exactly. 336 00:18:19,840 --> 00:18:25,640 And I actually recoil at the phrase bilingual advantage. 337 00:18:25,640 --> 00:18:28,240 For years I've been going around insisting 338 00:18:28,240 --> 00:18:30,680 that I never said that, but I did. (laughter) 339 00:18:30,680 --> 00:18:32,360 And people showed me that I did. So, OK. 340 00:18:32,360 --> 00:18:34,080 I mean, I was-- 341 00:18:34,080 --> 00:18:36,320 What would you like to call it today? 342 00:18:36,320 --> 00:18:38,280 What would you prefer to call it? 343 00:18:38,280 --> 00:18:40,760 Once you label it, once you label it, 344 00:18:40,760 --> 00:18:43,480 bilingual advantage, it becomes a thing. 345 00:18:43,480 --> 00:18:45,280 And once something is a thing, you 346 00:18:45,280 --> 00:18:47,000 can go out and look for it. 347 00:18:47,000 --> 00:18:48,600 So, let me look over here. 348 00:18:48,600 --> 00:18:49,920 Nope, not there. 349 00:18:49,920 --> 00:18:50,600 How about here? 350 00:18:50,600 --> 00:18:51,120 Is it here? 351 00:18:51,120 --> 00:18:52,120 Nope, not there. 352 00:18:52,120 --> 00:18:55,440 And when you don't find it, you say it doesn't exist. Right? 353 00:18:55,440 --> 00:18:58,000 So, you can't objectify it. 354 00:18:58,000 --> 00:19:03,200 It's an incredibly reductionist approach 355 00:19:03,200 --> 00:19:07,400 to a very complex set of abilities. 356 00:19:07,400 --> 00:19:14,080 So now what I would say is, from the moment of birth, 357 00:19:14,080 --> 00:19:19,280 bilingualism and just being in a bilingual environment, 358 00:19:19,280 --> 00:19:22,040 changes mind and brain. 359 00:19:22,040 --> 00:19:26,960 Children's brain development is instantly modified 360 00:19:26,960 --> 00:19:29,280 from being in a bilingual environment. 361 00:19:29,280 --> 00:19:33,040 Children's development from the earliest days 362 00:19:33,040 --> 00:19:37,000 are changed by being in a bilingual environment. 363 00:19:37,000 --> 00:19:41,800 And these adaptations continue throughout life. 364 00:19:41,800 --> 00:19:44,160 Now, are they advantages? 365 00:19:44,160 --> 00:19:46,520 On balance, they are advantages, 366 00:19:46,520 --> 00:19:50,800 because most of what's modified is better. 367 00:19:50,800 --> 00:19:55,960 And this experience leads to a more efficient and more 368 00:19:55,960 --> 00:19:58,040 resilient brain. 369 00:19:58,040 --> 00:20:00,360 So that's an advantage. 370 00:20:00,360 --> 00:20:03,800 But it doesn't mean that if you just pull a bilingual off 371 00:20:03,800 --> 00:20:07,720 the street, they're going to perform a Stroop test 372 00:20:07,720 --> 00:20:09,400 better than somebody else. 373 00:20:09,400 --> 00:20:11,080 That's not going to happen. 374 00:20:11,080 --> 00:20:13,560 It's not that kind of advantage. 375 00:20:13,560 --> 00:20:17,440 But it's a reconfiguration of mind and brain that leads 376 00:20:17,440 --> 00:20:21,480 to more resilience, better efficiency, 377 00:20:21,480 --> 00:20:24,800 and in the end, the real advantage 378 00:20:24,800 --> 00:20:31,280 is in older age, because cognition holds on better, 379 00:20:31,280 --> 00:20:36,440 because it's more adaptable to what this individual is 380 00:20:36,440 --> 00:20:38,080 trying to do. 381 00:20:38,080 --> 00:20:40,000 So that's the bilingual advantage. 382 00:20:40,000 --> 00:20:43,840 It's not the ability to do the Stroop test. 383 00:20:43,840 --> 00:20:49,160 It's a much broader based set of processes 384 00:20:49,160 --> 00:20:54,280 that are better tuned to the cognitive and brain challenges 385 00:20:54,280 --> 00:20:55,280 throughout life. 386 00:20:55,280 --> 00:20:56,040 OK. 387 00:20:56,040 --> 00:20:57,200 That makes a lot of sense. 388 00:20:57,200 --> 00:20:59,440 And we're going to talk in just a moment about, the evidence 389 00:20:59,440 --> 00:21:04,040 that you've published for that position 390 00:21:04,040 --> 00:21:08,240 about the advantages that emerge in older age. 391 00:21:08,240 --> 00:21:09,840 But before we quite get to that, 392 00:21:09,840 --> 00:21:14,800 I think that you're talking about essentially executive 393 00:21:14,800 --> 00:21:16,960 function advantages. 394 00:21:16,960 --> 00:21:19,200 But there's also these kinds of social advantages 395 00:21:19,200 --> 00:21:21,080 to being a bilingual that I actually 396 00:21:21,080 --> 00:21:24,720 think there's a much less contentious in the modern field. 397 00:21:24,720 --> 00:21:26,600 Do you think that's the case? 398 00:21:26,600 --> 00:21:27,200 I agree. 399 00:21:27,200 --> 00:21:29,920 And people don't really talk about that. 400 00:21:29,920 --> 00:21:32,040 Is it just because we all agree on that? 401 00:21:32,040 --> 00:21:33,480 I think we do agree with it. 402 00:21:33,480 --> 00:21:39,280 But I used to end talks and arguments by saying, 403 00:21:39,280 --> 00:21:42,160 even if everything I'm saying is wrong, 404 00:21:42,160 --> 00:21:45,160 even if there's no cognitive advantage, 405 00:21:45,160 --> 00:21:49,600 even if your brains aren't, even if all of that would be the case, 406 00:21:49,600 --> 00:21:54,600 which it isn't, a bilingual can speak two languages. 407 00:21:54,600 --> 00:21:56,400 And that's huge. 408 00:21:56,400 --> 00:21:58,680 They can travel to different places. 409 00:21:58,680 --> 00:22:00,000 They can read different books. 410 00:22:00,000 --> 00:22:02,040 They can communicate with different people. 411 00:22:02,040 --> 00:22:03,760 They can order different food. 412 00:22:03,760 --> 00:22:05,960 You can't take that piece away. 413 00:22:05,960 --> 00:22:08,080 And I think that's all advantage. 414 00:22:08,080 --> 00:22:09,040 But you're right. 415 00:22:09,040 --> 00:22:10,360 Nobody talks about it. 416 00:22:10,360 --> 00:22:10,880 Well, yeah. 417 00:22:10,880 --> 00:22:14,440 I think it's because it's a kind of a silent consensus. 418 00:22:14,440 --> 00:22:16,640 And I think from my perspective, I 419 00:22:16,640 --> 00:22:19,840 would just see it as being like, you have like, 420 00:22:19,840 --> 00:22:22,480 complete insight into the differing mindsets 421 00:22:22,480 --> 00:22:26,320 in two different human cultures, to the extent 422 00:22:26,320 --> 00:22:28,960 that mindset and language are interlinked in some way, which 423 00:22:28,960 --> 00:22:32,400 I kind of think they are, although I'm into Wolfian. 424 00:22:32,400 --> 00:22:35,160 But just having that, I think, would really enhance your 425 00:22:35,160 --> 00:22:36,640 understanding of what it is to be human. 426 00:22:36,640 --> 00:22:40,960 Because you've kind of got access to two ways of being human. 427 00:22:40,960 --> 00:22:42,280 Does that resonate with you at all? 428 00:22:42,280 --> 00:22:45,000 I agree. 429 00:22:45,000 --> 00:22:45,720 I agree. 430 00:22:45,720 --> 00:22:47,800 Now, I mean, I'm a cognitive psychologist, so I'm 431 00:22:47,800 --> 00:22:51,280 going to want to track down those cognitive changes too. 432 00:22:51,280 --> 00:22:54,520 But I mean, I think if you could just 433 00:22:54,520 --> 00:23:00,680 package that piece, you know, what do we mean to have that kind of access, 434 00:23:00,680 --> 00:23:06,000 that kind of perspective, I think that's an enormous benefit? 435 00:23:06,000 --> 00:23:07,440 Yeah, and we don't study that, do we? 436 00:23:07,440 --> 00:23:08,800 Like nobody's really studied. 437 00:23:08,800 --> 00:23:09,800 There are a few studies. 438 00:23:09,800 --> 00:23:14,360 Actually, there are a few studies that look on perspective 439 00:23:14,360 --> 00:23:15,080 taking. 440 00:23:15,080 --> 00:23:18,080 The ability to take a different position, a different perspective, 441 00:23:18,080 --> 00:23:20,720 and an argument, see things in another way. 442 00:23:20,720 --> 00:23:22,560 There's some studies. 443 00:23:22,560 --> 00:23:23,720 And it's all true. 444 00:23:23,720 --> 00:23:26,960 Bilinguals are good at that. 445 00:23:26,960 --> 00:23:27,480 Yeah. 446 00:23:27,480 --> 00:23:28,920 OK, great. 447 00:23:28,920 --> 00:23:31,560 So, let's now talk about the more contentious issue, which 448 00:23:31,560 --> 00:23:34,320 Is, the cognitive or executive advantages. 449 00:23:34,320 --> 00:23:36,520 I'm probably not going to say it in quite the way 450 00:23:36,520 --> 00:23:39,640 that you'd prefer to. 451 00:23:39,640 --> 00:23:43,920 But can we start with talking about your 2004 paper 452 00:23:43,920 --> 00:23:47,880 that I think was one of the very influential ones that 453 00:23:47,880 --> 00:23:52,840 made this case where you did use the Simon task, 454 00:23:52,840 --> 00:23:56,880 and you looked at older and younger bilinguals and monolinguals. 455 00:23:56,880 --> 00:24:00,560 Can you kind of run through what you found in that paper? 456 00:24:00,560 --> 00:24:01,080 Right. 457 00:24:01,080 --> 00:24:02,600 So, that paper came out. 458 00:24:02,600 --> 00:24:05,760 I'm going to go back to this, you do the next thing, 459 00:24:05,760 --> 00:24:06,680 and then the next thing. 460 00:24:06,680 --> 00:24:12,560 So, I'd been a developmental psychologist forever. 461 00:24:12,560 --> 00:24:16,560 I'd only ever done research with children. 462 00:24:16,560 --> 00:24:23,480 And I had kind of gotten as far as I could with bilingual children. 463 00:24:23,480 --> 00:24:26,680 I was giving them all these children, 464 00:24:26,680 --> 00:24:32,520 child-appropriate tasks, where they had to do certain things 465 00:24:32,520 --> 00:24:36,360 that looked like what we would call executive functioning, 466 00:24:36,360 --> 00:24:38,400 but these were little kids. 467 00:24:38,400 --> 00:24:41,360 So, I'd gotten as far as I could with that. 468 00:24:41,360 --> 00:24:50,200 And I got this grant that included release time. 469 00:24:50,200 --> 00:25:00,320 So, I used the grant to learn how to do adult cognitive research, 470 00:25:00,320 --> 00:25:02,480 because I've never really done it. 471 00:25:02,480 --> 00:25:05,680 And I spent two years at this wonderful institute, 472 00:25:05,680 --> 00:25:08,640 the Rotman Research Institute, working with colleagues 473 00:25:08,640 --> 00:25:16,080 there, trying to figure out how we would take my research 474 00:25:16,080 --> 00:25:19,240 with children, bilingual children, 475 00:25:19,240 --> 00:25:23,680 and re-instantiate it in a meaningful way with adults, 476 00:25:23,680 --> 00:25:25,240 because nobody had ever looked at that. 477 00:25:25,240 --> 00:25:29,720 That was complete Terran Cognita. 478 00:25:29,720 --> 00:25:31,280 So, we came up with this study. 479 00:25:31,280 --> 00:25:37,280 The first study, exactly the one you mentioned, 480 00:25:37,280 --> 00:25:39,040 where we had, 481 00:25:39,040 --> 00:25:41,080 and because I wasn't in a university, 482 00:25:41,080 --> 00:25:45,440 we didn't have access to an undergraduate research pool. 483 00:25:45,440 --> 00:25:48,480 So, there was no young adults, which is… 484 00:25:48,480 --> 00:25:51,080 What's a cognitive psychologist to do? (Laughter) 485 00:25:51,080 --> 00:25:52,320 Exactly. 486 00:25:52,320 --> 00:25:55,280 That's what all cognitive psychology is based on. 487 00:25:55,280 --> 00:25:58,800 19-year-old kids taking psych 100, right? 488 00:25:58,800 --> 00:26:00,080 That's it. 489 00:26:00,080 --> 00:26:02,720 But anyway, I didn't have access to that, because I was at this other place, 490 00:26:02,720 --> 00:26:05,840 which was a geriatric hospital. 491 00:26:05,840 --> 00:26:09,280 So, I had access to older adults. 492 00:26:09,280 --> 00:26:12,800 And so, we filled it in with what we call middle-aged adults. 493 00:26:12,800 --> 00:26:14,560 And they were just people in the community 494 00:26:14,560 --> 00:26:17,680 that we got largely by word of mouth. 495 00:26:17,680 --> 00:26:21,320 And we did this study, and the results were very dramatic. 496 00:26:21,320 --> 00:26:24,280 And to this day, I'm not convinced there 497 00:26:24,280 --> 00:26:26,160 Wasn’t a problem in this study. 498 00:26:26,160 --> 00:26:28,560 The results were almost too dramatic, 499 00:26:28,560 --> 00:26:32,240 because I've replicated that basic design many times, 500 00:26:32,240 --> 00:26:36,560 and the results have never been quite as large. 501 00:26:36,560 --> 00:26:39,920 We get significant results, lots of them. 502 00:26:39,920 --> 00:26:43,240 But that was particularly eye-popping. 503 00:26:43,240 --> 00:26:45,360 Can you share the results with our listeners 504 00:26:45,360 --> 00:26:48,480 who will not necessarily have read the paper? 505 00:26:48,480 --> 00:26:49,720 OK. 506 00:26:49,720 --> 00:26:54,800 We had monolingual and bilingual participants 507 00:26:54,800 --> 00:27:01,120 who were either like 45-years-old or 75-years-old. 508 00:27:01,120 --> 00:27:03,200 And they did a Simon task, which 509 00:27:03,200 --> 00:27:06,920 is a standard executive function measure 510 00:27:06,920 --> 00:27:09,800 in the cognitive literature. 511 00:27:09,800 --> 00:27:11,960 The task is very simple. 512 00:27:11,960 --> 00:27:19,320 You have to control your response by resisting a compelling queue. 513 00:27:19,320 --> 00:27:25,040 You look at a screen, and there is do we use arrows? 514 00:27:25,040 --> 00:27:27,200 Or I don't remember what the stimuli were, 515 00:27:27,200 --> 00:27:30,280 but they might have colored squares or something. 516 00:27:30,280 --> 00:27:31,400 And you get a rule. 517 00:27:31,400 --> 00:27:34,880 If you see a red square, press the right button. 518 00:27:34,880 --> 00:27:40,240 If you see a green square, press the left button. 519 00:27:40,240 --> 00:27:41,680 So that's easy. 520 00:27:41,680 --> 00:27:47,320 Except the red and green squares appeared on one 521 00:27:47,320 --> 00:27:49,160 or the other side. 522 00:27:49,160 --> 00:27:54,200 Either matching the response key or conflicting with it. 523 00:27:54,200 --> 00:27:59,600 And overriding that position cue is incredibly difficult. 524 00:27:59,600 --> 00:28:05,080 You need a lot of control because the stimulus flashes on, 525 00:28:05,080 --> 00:28:09,520 and you automatically want to respond to the flashing 526 00:28:09,520 --> 00:28:10,720 stimulus. 527 00:28:10,720 --> 00:28:14,720 It's a much faster response than stopping 528 00:28:14,720 --> 00:28:18,280 to decide what color it is and then which key you need to press. 529 00:28:18,280 --> 00:28:21,120 So, this is a well-known effect, the Simon effect. 530 00:28:21,120 --> 00:28:25,320 And the basic idea is that the difference 531 00:28:25,320 --> 00:28:29,840 between your reaction time to respond 532 00:28:29,840 --> 00:28:33,760 to the congruent case where it's a red box 533 00:28:33,760 --> 00:28:34,800 and it's on the right, 534 00:28:34,800 --> 00:28:40,880 and that's the right key versus a red box on the left, 535 00:28:40,880 --> 00:28:42,920 where you still have to press the right key. 536 00:28:42,920 --> 00:28:47,560 The difference in time is the Simon effect. 537 00:28:47,560 --> 00:28:53,280 So, we did this, and we found that in both groups, 538 00:28:53,280 --> 00:29:00,160 the Simon effect cost was much greater for the monolinguls. 539 00:29:00,160 --> 00:29:05,000 So, the bilinguals could resolve that conflict, 540 00:29:05,000 --> 00:29:10,120 avoid the pull of the position, and respond correctly 541 00:29:10,120 --> 00:29:12,200 for much longer. 542 00:29:12,200 --> 00:29:15,160 So that was the first time this had been reported. 543 00:29:15,160 --> 00:29:17,960 And it got a lot of attention. 544 00:29:17,960 --> 00:29:18,280 Yeah. 545 00:29:18,280 --> 00:29:21,080 And it's an extremely strong effect in your paper. 546 00:29:21,080 --> 00:29:23,040 And as you mentioned, like you wonder, 547 00:29:23,040 --> 00:29:26,440 if you didn't get quite a strong and effect later, 548 00:29:26,440 --> 00:29:27,640 what kind of issues do you think 549 00:29:27,640 --> 00:29:30,600 that could have been with that first paper that led 550 00:29:30,600 --> 00:29:32,480 to such a striking finding? 551 00:29:32,480 --> 00:29:32,720 Yeah. 552 00:29:32,720 --> 00:29:36,040 I think there was something about the parameters 553 00:29:36,040 --> 00:29:38,400 we were using in the design. 554 00:29:38,400 --> 00:29:39,520 I don't know. 555 00:29:39,520 --> 00:29:44,560 We've replicated the effect just not as large. 556 00:29:44,560 --> 00:29:45,920 Mm-hmm. 557 00:29:45,920 --> 00:29:48,200 I mean, were the groups, were the monolinguals and bilinguals 558 00:29:48,200 --> 00:29:50,200 like similar in other respects? 559 00:29:50,200 --> 00:29:51,280 Maybe not. 560 00:29:51,280 --> 00:29:55,440 I maybe, you know, there, anything you don't control carefully 561 00:29:55,440 --> 00:29:58,200 enough can influence the results. 562 00:29:58,200 --> 00:30:01,960 And so, you know, maybe one day I should go back 563 00:30:01,960 --> 00:30:06,280 and dig up those data and see if I can figure out why the effect 564 00:30:06,280 --> 00:30:08,280 was so large. 565 00:30:08,280 --> 00:30:11,440 But maybe if the effect hadn't been so large, 566 00:30:11,440 --> 00:30:14,280 it would not have caught the attention of so masny people (Laughter) 567 00:30:14,280 --> 00:30:15,880 Who knows… (Laughter) 568 00:30:15,880 --> 00:30:16,480 569 00:30:16,480 --> 00:30:18,640 So maybe it's like the Peal and Lambert study. 570 00:30:18,640 --> 00:30:20,080 Like even if it wasn't perfect, 571 00:30:20,080 --> 00:30:21,760 it set the field in a helpful direction. 572 00:30:21,760 --> 00:30:23,160 That's a very good point. 573 00:30:23,160 --> 00:30:25,800 Yeah, that's what you all wanted to say, right? 574 00:30:25,800 --> 00:30:28,160 So, yeah, I mean, there's been like, you know, 575 00:30:28,160 --> 00:30:31,560 20 years of work since then, many replications, 576 00:30:31,560 --> 00:30:34,480 some failed replications we can talk about. 577 00:30:34,480 --> 00:30:39,960 But it's not like it's been just left there to stand on its own. 578 00:30:39,960 --> 00:30:44,720 So next, I wanted to talk about the 2007 paper, 579 00:30:44,720 --> 00:30:47,360 because especially with respect to people who 580 00:30:47,360 --> 00:30:50,240 listen to my podcast, it's about language and the brain. 581 00:30:50,240 --> 00:30:54,120 So, this is like the brainiest of your papers 582 00:30:54,120 --> 00:30:57,840 because it's got people with dementia. 583 00:30:57,840 --> 00:31:01,840 So, can you tell us about that 2007 paper 584 00:31:01,840 --> 00:31:03,400 and what you found there? 585 00:31:03,400 --> 00:31:07,920 Yeah, so actually, it's a perfect segue 586 00:31:07,920 --> 00:31:10,200 from what we're just talking about. 587 00:31:10,200 --> 00:31:13,520 When the 2004 paper was published, 588 00:31:13,520 --> 00:31:19,320 I got non-stop calls from international press, hundreds 589 00:31:19,320 --> 00:31:26,600 and hundreds of reporters wanted to talk about that study. 590 00:31:26,600 --> 00:31:28,680 And I mean, this, like, you know, 591 00:31:28,680 --> 00:31:31,160 Reuters called me and it was in all their papers, 592 00:31:31,160 --> 00:31:33,360 AP called me, it was in all their papers. 593 00:31:33,360 --> 00:31:37,320 So, there was huge amount of press. 594 00:31:37,320 --> 00:31:45,440 And every single science writer I spoke to, asked the same question. 595 00:31:45,440 --> 00:31:49,480 Do you think this is helpful for dementia? 596 00:31:49,480 --> 00:31:54,920 And I had to say, like, 400 times, I have no idea. 597 00:31:54,920 --> 00:31:57,000 All of our participants were healthy. 598 00:31:57,000 --> 00:32:00,040 If they weren't healthy and cognitively OK, 599 00:32:00,040 --> 00:32:02,000 they wouldn't have been in a study. 600 00:32:02,000 --> 00:32:04,760 I have no idea. 601 00:32:04,760 --> 00:32:08,760 But science writers are very smart. 602 00:32:08,760 --> 00:32:10,920 And most of them are PhDs in science. 603 00:32:10,920 --> 00:32:15,560 It's a really highly educated group at the highest level. 604 00:32:15,560 --> 00:32:21,200 So, when 300 science writers ask you the same question, 605 00:32:21,200 --> 00:32:22,360 you've got to pay attention. 606 00:32:22,360 --> 00:32:25,440 Yeah, you're like, that's the next question to work on. 607 00:32:25,440 --> 00:32:28,440 Uh-huh. 608 00:32:28,440 --> 00:32:34,720 And so, since I was already at this geriatric hospital, 609 00:32:34,720 --> 00:32:43,920 and already had access to the clinic and people who knew how to do this, 610 00:32:43,920 --> 00:32:48,080 we set up the study with the clinic. 611 00:32:48,080 --> 00:32:53,800 And the first study in that 2007 paper was very simply, 612 00:32:53,800 --> 00:32:56,880 we went through the clinic records. 613 00:32:56,880 --> 00:33:01,400 And Toronto is very, very diverse. 614 00:33:01,400 --> 00:33:05,840 You know, you just dip your hand into the population, 615 00:33:05,840 --> 00:33:10,480 and half the people you grab will be bilingual, always. 616 00:33:10,480 --> 00:33:12,320 It's just that diverse. 617 00:33:12,320 --> 00:33:17,440 So, our first study, we thought all we're going to do 618 00:33:17,440 --> 00:33:19,720 is see if there's anything there. 619 00:33:19,720 --> 00:33:22,000 So, we went through the clinic records, 620 00:33:22,000 --> 00:33:29,640 and we pulled out files for people who had no or few, 621 00:33:29,640 --> 00:33:33,720 because there's no, everybody has co-morbidities. 622 00:33:33,720 --> 00:33:38,360 But we pulled out as much as possible clear diagnoses 623 00:33:38,360 --> 00:33:42,680 of dementia without a bunch of other stuff. 624 00:33:42,680 --> 00:33:50,760 We recorded education, background, socioeconomic stuff. 625 00:33:50,760 --> 00:33:53,200 You know, what was your occupation? 626 00:33:53,200 --> 00:33:57,160 And crucially, language history. 627 00:33:57,160 --> 00:34:01,880 And the only thing that we were interested in at that point, 628 00:34:01,880 --> 00:34:06,200 in that first study, was age of diagnosis. 629 00:34:06,200 --> 00:34:07,720 Yeah. 630 00:34:07,720 --> 00:34:12,680 That makes sense as a measure, because if bilingualism is protective 631 00:34:12,680 --> 00:34:16,440 in some sense, then you might expect 632 00:34:16,440 --> 00:34:19,240 that they would be diagnosed later. 633 00:34:19,240 --> 00:34:21,080 Before we talk about what you found, 634 00:34:21,080 --> 00:34:24,800 can you talk about, was it easy to characterize bilingual status 635 00:34:24,800 --> 00:34:28,240 based on the medical record? Was that information, well recorded? 636 00:34:28,240 --> 00:34:30,240 It was not easy. 637 00:34:30,240 --> 00:34:32,920 I can say that after our study, that hospital now 638 00:34:32,920 --> 00:34:36,000 collects full-language data for everything. 639 00:34:36,000 --> 00:34:39,320 So, that was a good legacy. 640 00:34:39,320 --> 00:34:41,800 It was not easy. 641 00:34:41,800 --> 00:34:45,320 And in fact, we went through hundreds of files 642 00:34:45,320 --> 00:34:49,640 that we could not use just because we weren't sure. 643 00:34:49,640 --> 00:34:56,080 So, we only ended up reporting the data from the files 644 00:34:56,080 --> 00:35:01,400 where we were really certain about the person's background. 645 00:35:01,400 --> 00:35:07,160 And the more ambiguous cases, we just didn't want that kind of mess, 646 00:35:07,160 --> 00:35:09,320 so, we didn't include them. 647 00:35:09,320 --> 00:35:15,280 So, these were clear cases of people we really believed were 648 00:35:15,280 --> 00:35:18,080 monolingual or bilingual. 649 00:35:18,080 --> 00:35:18,920 Uh-huh. 650 00:35:18,920 --> 00:35:20,880 And what did you find? 651 00:35:20,880 --> 00:35:25,040 We found that all else being equal, 652 00:35:25,040 --> 00:35:29,200 the age at which they were first diagnosed with dementia 653 00:35:29,200 --> 00:35:34,760 was four and a half years later in bilinguals. 654 00:35:34,760 --> 00:35:36,560 That's a very large effect size. 655 00:35:36,560 --> 00:35:37,680 It's huge. 656 00:35:37,680 --> 00:35:40,120 It's huge. 657 00:35:40,120 --> 00:35:44,600 And so, you immediately must have wondered, 658 00:35:44,600 --> 00:35:49,400 and I know because you looked at the analyses from the paper, 659 00:35:49,400 --> 00:35:52,280 what differences between your groups could potentially 660 00:35:52,280 --> 00:35:55,080 explain that, apart from the difference 661 00:35:55,080 --> 00:35:57,440 that you think it is, which is the bilingualism difference? 662 00:35:57,440 --> 00:35:58,960 So, what kind of things did you investigate? 663 00:35:58,960 --> 00:36:00,240 Well, so we looked at a lot of that. 664 00:36:00,240 --> 00:36:03,600 We looked at all kinds of things about their lifestyle. 665 00:36:03,600 --> 00:36:09,680 Right after that paper came out, a group in India 666 00:36:09,680 --> 00:36:14,280 where they have a much larger population, thought, 667 00:36:14,280 --> 00:36:17,560 oh, that's really interesting, but I wonder if it holds up. 668 00:36:17,560 --> 00:36:21,120 So, they just followed our methodology in their clinic 669 00:36:21,120 --> 00:36:23,040 and they had like 1,000 patients. 670 00:36:23,040 --> 00:36:25,040 Are you talking about Alladi et al., 2013. 671 00:36:25,040 --> 00:36:26,360 Alladi and Bak 672 00:36:26,360 --> 00:36:27,360 Yeah. 673 00:36:27,360 --> 00:36:28,760 Alladi and Bak. 674 00:36:28,760 --> 00:36:30,320 Suvarna Alladi. 675 00:36:30,320 --> 00:36:33,000 She was the neurologist in this clinic. 676 00:36:33,000 --> 00:36:35,720 Thomas Bak is the neurologist also, 677 00:36:35,720 --> 00:36:38,680 but he worked in Edinburgh. 678 00:36:38,680 --> 00:36:40,720 So, they collaborate on this study, 679 00:36:40,720 --> 00:36:42,960 and they had almost 1,000 patients. 680 00:36:42,960 --> 00:36:46,760 And they found in their sample that bilingual patients 681 00:36:46,760 --> 00:36:51,720 were diagnosed for 4 and a half years later than monolinguals. 682 00:36:51,720 --> 00:36:53,440 Replicated exactly. 683 00:36:53,440 --> 00:36:58,120 There's now like 20 studies from all over the world 684 00:36:58,120 --> 00:36:59,600 that have that result. 685 00:36:59,600 --> 00:37:04,400 So, it just replicates all over the place. 686 00:37:04,400 --> 00:37:06,600 Yeah, there's definitely… 687 00:37:06,600 --> 00:37:12,600 it's definitely a lot of people have run that basic design. 688 00:37:12,600 --> 00:37:17,480 So, what kind of factors did you look at in yours? 689 00:37:17,480 --> 00:37:21,840 Like you looked at education, immigrant status. 690 00:37:21,840 --> 00:37:24,120 How did your groups, do you remember how 691 00:37:24,120 --> 00:37:26,080 your groups compared on these kind of factors? 692 00:37:26,080 --> 00:37:29,800 Yeah, well, as much as possible, they were similar. 693 00:37:29,800 --> 00:37:35,600 In fact, I remember that the monolinguals had more education 694 00:37:35,600 --> 00:37:37,760 than the bilinguals. 695 00:37:37,760 --> 00:37:40,320 But I had a story about why that was the case. 696 00:37:40,320 --> 00:37:46,040 And the reason is that this hospital is a Jewish hospital, 697 00:37:46,040 --> 00:37:51,960 most of the older bilinguals arrived after the war. 698 00:37:51,960 --> 00:37:57,720 And they didn't go to high school because of life. 699 00:37:57,720 --> 00:38:00,760 So, they were stuck in war-torn Europe, 700 00:38:00,760 --> 00:38:04,320 or they survived the war, and then they immigrated. 701 00:38:04,320 --> 00:38:09,520 So, the number of formal years of education in that group 702 00:38:09,520 --> 00:38:12,360 was significantly less than the monolinguals, 703 00:38:12,360 --> 00:38:14,720 but not because they weren't smart people. 704 00:38:14,720 --> 00:38:15,240 Yeah, exactly. 705 00:38:15,240 --> 00:38:17,560 No, that was striking when I read your paper. 706 00:38:17,560 --> 00:38:20,520 I was like, OK, this potential education 707 00:38:20,520 --> 00:38:22,480 confound goes in the wrong direction. 708 00:38:22,480 --> 00:38:25,800 I mean, it goes in, it doesn't help. 709 00:38:25,800 --> 00:38:29,080 Yeah, it's not a confound that would explain it. 710 00:38:29,080 --> 00:38:31,640 But your bilinguals were mostly immigrants, 711 00:38:31,640 --> 00:38:32,840 and your monolinguals mostly non-immigrants. 712 00:38:32,840 --> 00:38:33,680 Yeah, right. 713 00:38:33,680 --> 00:38:36,880 So, immigrants, people latched onto that, 714 00:38:36,880 --> 00:38:39,680 or the healthy immigrant effect. 715 00:38:39,680 --> 00:38:42,240 But in India, none of them were immigrants, 716 00:38:42,240 --> 00:38:44,800 and in many of the other replications, 717 00:38:44,800 --> 00:38:46,920 none of them were immigrants. 718 00:38:46,920 --> 00:38:51,400 So, it is the case that our bilinguals are usually immigrants, 719 00:38:51,400 --> 00:38:54,440 and we try to control for that. 720 00:38:54,440 --> 00:38:59,120 We did subset analyses where we only looked at non-immigrants. 721 00:38:59,120 --> 00:39:03,560 So, native bilinguals and native monolinguals, 722 00:39:03,560 --> 00:39:05,400 we got the same result. 723 00:39:05,400 --> 00:39:06,240 So, we tried. 724 00:39:06,240 --> 00:39:09,640 We tried to see if there was a confound. 725 00:39:09,640 --> 00:39:10,640 Yeah, definitely. 726 00:39:10,640 --> 00:39:13,120 It's clear that you were addressing this question 727 00:39:13,120 --> 00:39:14,280 from the outset. 728 00:39:14,280 --> 00:39:16,400 I mean, when you say the healthy immigrant effect, 729 00:39:16,400 --> 00:39:18,720 just to flesh that out for people that haven't been 730 00:39:18,720 --> 00:39:23,000 thinking about it for 20 years, what's the idea there? 731 00:39:23,000 --> 00:39:25,800 Well, I'm only saying that because we 732 00:39:25,800 --> 00:39:27,720 were told that this is a thing. 733 00:39:27,720 --> 00:39:28,240 OK. 734 00:39:28,240 --> 00:39:32,120 I was never heard of it until someone published a critique 735 00:39:32,120 --> 00:39:34,240 of actually, our next paper. 736 00:39:34,240 --> 00:39:38,040 I think the next paper was a more important paper. 737 00:39:38,040 --> 00:39:40,680 It was a more careful study. 738 00:39:40,680 --> 00:39:45,080 So, we went into a different hospital. 739 00:39:45,080 --> 00:39:48,040 And here the question was, what's going on? 740 00:39:48,040 --> 00:39:50,640 How come these bilinguals are older? 741 00:39:50,640 --> 00:39:51,160 So… 742 00:39:51,160 --> 00:39:53,600 Sorry, just for my second keep track. 743 00:39:53,600 --> 00:39:55,600 Are you talking about Schweizer et al., 2012? 744 00:39:55,600 --> 00:39:56,120 Yes. Yes. You are good. (Laughter) 745 00:39:56,120 --> 00:39:56,280 746 00:39:56,280 --> 00:39:57,080 747 00:39:57,080 --> 00:39:57,680 748 00:39:57,680 --> 00:39:58,200 749 00:39:58,200 --> 00:39:59,200 750 00:39:59,200 --> 00:39:59,800 751 00:39:59,800 --> 00:40:00,800 You read this. 752 00:40:00,800 --> 00:40:04,160 So, Schweizer, he's a neuropsychologist. 753 00:40:04,160 --> 00:40:07,120 And working in a different hospital. 754 00:40:07,120 --> 00:40:11,800 And here we turn the question around. 755 00:40:11,800 --> 00:40:17,880 So, what we wanted to do was look directly 756 00:40:17,880 --> 00:40:23,240 at the Alzheimer's neuropathology in monolingual 757 00:40:23,240 --> 00:40:25,960 and bilingual patients. 758 00:40:25,960 --> 00:40:30,800 So, this study was really carefully controlled. 759 00:40:30,800 --> 00:40:38,520 We took Alzheimer's patients from their clinic 760 00:40:38,520 --> 00:40:41,800 at this different hospital, St. Michael's Hospital. 761 00:40:41,800 --> 00:40:49,560 And we matched them on chronological age. 762 00:40:49,560 --> 00:40:54,160 So, we're not looking for bilinguals to be older. 763 00:40:54,160 --> 00:40:56,080 We're looking for 764 00:40:56,080 --> 00:40:58,400 because brains change, right? 765 00:40:58,400 --> 00:40:59,360 Brains change. 766 00:40:59,360 --> 00:41:04,400 So, we want them to be the same chronological age. 767 00:41:04,400 --> 00:41:09,000 We also wanted them to be at the same level 768 00:41:09,000 --> 00:41:14,720 of Alzheimer's pathology, clinically, clinical domain. 769 00:41:14,720 --> 00:41:18,400 So, their clinical levels were the same. 770 00:41:18,400 --> 00:41:25,600 So, if these pairs of people presented to a neurologist, 771 00:41:25,600 --> 00:41:29,320 the neurologist would not see anything different between them 772 00:41:29,320 --> 00:41:31,560 in all of the behavioral measures, 773 00:41:31,560 --> 00:41:35,760 in all of the background measures, in the demographics, 774 00:41:35,760 --> 00:41:39,200 they were matched for education and SES. 775 00:41:39,200 --> 00:41:42,000 They were completely matched. 776 00:41:42,000 --> 00:41:43,960 And then we looked at their brains. 777 00:41:43,960 --> 00:41:52,120 We had CT scans of their brains. 778 00:41:52,120 --> 00:41:57,360 And if you, and these were early Alzheimer's patients, 779 00:41:57,360 --> 00:42:03,560 so, the main accumulation of the beta-amyloid 780 00:42:03,560 --> 00:42:07,600 and all of their problems are in the hippocampal area, 781 00:42:07,600 --> 00:42:11,720 In the temporal lobe, which is why memory goes first. 782 00:42:11,720 --> 00:42:17,760 And when we compared side by side the CT scans 783 00:42:17,760 --> 00:42:20,200 for the monolinguals and bilinguals, 784 00:42:20,200 --> 00:42:24,800 the bilinguals had significantly more deterioration. 785 00:42:24,800 --> 00:42:26,200 They had worse brains. 786 00:42:26,200 --> 00:42:26,700 Yeah. 787 00:42:26,700 --> 00:42:29,220 The pathology was more advanced. 788 00:42:29,220 --> 00:42:33,860 And yet despite the pathology being more advanced, 789 00:42:33,860 --> 00:42:39,380 they presented at the same level as these monolinguals 790 00:42:39,380 --> 00:42:42,260 with less advanced disease. 791 00:42:42,260 --> 00:42:42,760 Yes. 792 00:42:42,760 --> 00:42:43,100 OK. 793 00:42:43,100 --> 00:42:46,700 So that really brings home your interpretation, right? 794 00:42:46,700 --> 00:42:49,500 You're not saying that bilingualism stops the brain 795 00:42:49,500 --> 00:42:52,180 from undergoing pathological process of aging. 796 00:42:52,180 --> 00:42:55,220 You're saying that a bilingual brain is better 797 00:42:55,220 --> 00:42:59,260 positioned to handle the pathological changes of aging, 798 00:42:59,260 --> 00:43:00,320 yeah? 799 00:43:00,320 --> 00:43:01,580 Exactly. 800 00:43:01,580 --> 00:43:03,780 That's exactly right. 801 00:43:03,780 --> 00:43:06,260 And then that's why it's important 802 00:43:06,260 --> 00:43:13,260 to distinguish between age of onset studies 803 00:43:13,260 --> 00:43:17,660 like this and incidence studies. 804 00:43:17,660 --> 00:43:21,260 So, some people turn to incidence studies and say, look, 805 00:43:21,260 --> 00:43:24,260 bilinguals are getting Alzheimer's. 806 00:43:24,260 --> 00:43:26,020 Of course they are. 807 00:43:26,020 --> 00:43:31,780 It doesn't stop the pathology, but it gives resources 808 00:43:31,780 --> 00:43:36,660 for the individual to cope with the pathology 809 00:43:36,660 --> 00:43:43,620 and hold on to better cognitive functioning for longer. 810 00:43:43,620 --> 00:43:44,300 Right. 811 00:43:44,300 --> 00:43:45,180 Yeah. 812 00:43:45,180 --> 00:43:49,620 So, I think that it's probably a fair 813 00:43:49,620 --> 00:43:51,660 I'm not sure, correct me if I'm wrong, 814 00:43:51,660 --> 00:43:52,860 but my reading of the literature 815 00:43:52,860 --> 00:43:56,260 Is, there's quite a few solid replications 816 00:43:56,260 --> 00:43:57,740 that use a similar approach to you 817 00:43:57,740 --> 00:43:59,940 where you look at age of onset. 818 00:43:59,940 --> 00:44:02,900 And then there's several large longitudinal studies 819 00:44:02,900 --> 00:44:06,540 that often don't replicate your finding, 820 00:44:06,540 --> 00:44:07,900 and they don't find difference between 821 00:44:07,900 --> 00:44:09,620 monolingual and bilingual groups. 822 00:44:09,620 --> 00:44:12,420 And you've made the case that, 823 00:44:12,420 --> 00:44:14,940 I mean, you've basically pointed out 824 00:44:14,940 --> 00:44:16,820 flaws in those longitudinal studies, 825 00:44:16,820 --> 00:44:18,700 including what you just said. 826 00:44:18,700 --> 00:44:21,260 It's not that you're saying that you'll never get dementia. 827 00:44:21,260 --> 00:44:24,100 It's that it'll be later. 828 00:44:24,100 --> 00:44:26,860 But yeah, so I think like-- 829 00:44:26,860 --> 00:44:30,300 to me, one of the most strongest longitudinal studies 830 00:44:30,300 --> 00:44:33,580 that I read was the Zahodne et al., 2014. 831 00:44:33,580 --> 00:44:36,180 I'm sure you read it because you've written about it. 832 00:44:36,180 --> 00:44:38,660 And I found that study interesting to talk about, 833 00:44:38,660 --> 00:44:42,340 because I think it's a good study that doesn't support 834 00:44:42,340 --> 00:44:45,140 your findings, but also does have some silver linings 835 00:44:45,140 --> 00:44:47,220 for your perspective at the same time. 836 00:44:47,220 --> 00:44:49,340 But this study totally supports it. 837 00:44:49,340 --> 00:44:50,700 OK, so tell us about that. 838 00:44:50,700 --> 00:44:51,200 Yeah. 839 00:44:51,200 --> 00:44:52,780 There are two things about that study. 840 00:44:52,780 --> 00:44:55,180 First of all, there were no monolinguals. 841 00:44:55,180 --> 00:44:56,940 They say there were, but they weren't. 842 00:44:56,940 --> 00:45:00,300 The study was done in New York City in Spanish Harlem. 843 00:45:00,300 --> 00:45:02,700 People lived there for 50 years. 844 00:45:02,700 --> 00:45:07,260 And in the study, they were designated as Spanish monolingual. 845 00:45:07,260 --> 00:45:10,460 So, after 50 years, you're going to pick up something. 846 00:45:10,460 --> 00:45:12,460 So, there really were no monolinguals. 847 00:45:12,460 --> 00:45:15,100 But more importantly than that, they 848 00:45:15,100 --> 00:45:18,180 designed it as an incidence study. 849 00:45:18,180 --> 00:45:20,700 And there was no difference in incidence. 850 00:45:20,700 --> 00:45:25,340 But deep buried in the paper is the fact 851 00:45:25,340 --> 00:45:30,140 that the bilinguals were older when they were diagnosed. 852 00:45:30,140 --> 00:45:36,340 Yeah, that's true in the simple model with no variance. 853 00:45:36,340 --> 00:45:37,260 They were older. 854 00:45:37,260 --> 00:45:38,340 And that's all I'm saying. 855 00:45:38,340 --> 00:45:42,500 They're going to be older, not that they're not going to succumb. 856 00:45:42,500 --> 00:45:46,780 But they're going to be older when it becomes diapparent 857 00:45:46,780 --> 00:45:48,380 and then diagnosed. 858 00:45:48,380 --> 00:45:51,460 Yeah, the study, just to fill in people 859 00:45:51,460 --> 00:45:56,660 that haven't read it recently, you would have read it 860 00:45:56,660 --> 00:45:57,180 a while ago. 861 00:45:57,180 --> 00:45:59,260 I've read it recently. 862 00:45:59,260 --> 00:46:02,740 So, the immigrants came from Latin America, 863 00:46:02,740 --> 00:46:05,300 and they were all native Spanish speakers, 864 00:46:05,300 --> 00:46:07,300 and they varied in their English speaking ability. 865 00:46:07,300 --> 00:46:08,300 And that was their contrast. 866 00:46:08,300 --> 00:46:10,740 It was people that said that they spoke English well, 867 00:46:10,740 --> 00:46:12,420 all the way down to people who said they spoke English, 868 00:46:12,420 --> 00:46:13,300 not at all. 869 00:46:13,300 --> 00:46:14,700 Your point is that, well, if you've 870 00:46:14,700 --> 00:46:17,580 been in America for like 30, 40 years, 871 00:46:17,580 --> 00:46:21,220 you probably don't speak English not at all. 872 00:46:21,220 --> 00:46:25,420 So yes, it's not the same kind of contrast that you've made. 873 00:46:25,420 --> 00:46:29,820 But yeah, there was definitely trends in their data 874 00:46:29,820 --> 00:46:32,340 that the more bilingual, 875 00:46:32,340 --> 00:46:33,700 that's kind of same more bilingual. 876 00:46:33,700 --> 00:46:37,500 The more bilingual individuals did better. 877 00:46:37,500 --> 00:46:39,460 Well, they definitely did better on memory and executive 878 00:46:39,460 --> 00:46:40,300 function, interestingly. 879 00:46:40,300 --> 00:46:41,100 Yeah, they did. 880 00:46:41,100 --> 00:46:47,060 I don't think their paper contradict anything that I've said. 881 00:46:47,060 --> 00:46:49,620 I think it, well, I mean, it wasn't statistically 882 00:46:49,620 --> 00:46:53,260 significant for the thing that you care about the most. 883 00:46:53,260 --> 00:46:56,260 But there was a trend in that direction. 884 00:46:56,260 --> 00:47:00,580 And there was, yeah, there were significant effects 885 00:47:00,580 --> 00:47:03,020 on memory and executive function in their bilingual. 886 00:47:03,020 --> 00:47:04,500 So, I think it had a lot of, 887 00:47:04,500 --> 00:47:06,300 I think it's an, I brought it up because I think it's 888 00:47:06,300 --> 00:47:10,100 an example of a non-replication that nevertheless has 889 00:47:10,100 --> 00:47:12,100 a lot of silver linings if you… 890 00:47:12,100 --> 00:47:14,700 I've never thought that was… 891 00:47:14,700 --> 00:47:17,980 I thought the way they wrote it up and pitched, interpreted 892 00:47:17,980 --> 00:47:22,060 their results, was problematic for what I'm saying. 893 00:47:22,060 --> 00:47:24,220 But I never thought their data were. 894 00:47:24,220 --> 00:47:25,940 Yeah, no, it's a well done study. 895 00:47:25,940 --> 00:47:28,340 And they just, yeah, they just took a different… 896 00:47:28,340 --> 00:47:29,580 yeah, they went a different direction 897 00:47:29,580 --> 00:47:30,380 with their interpretation. 898 00:47:30,380 --> 00:47:32,580 Yaakov Stern, he is the best, right? 899 00:47:32,580 --> 00:47:35,100 He knows how to do this stuff. 900 00:47:35,100 --> 00:47:40,380 But, so I think there's a lot of issues there that 901 00:47:40,380 --> 00:47:43,100 need to be taken into account. 902 00:47:43,100 --> 00:47:44,660 Yeah, no, for sure. 903 00:47:44,660 --> 00:47:48,180 I mean, yeah, so you brought up earlier 904 00:47:48,180 --> 00:47:51,620 like your, later, your current perspective 905 00:47:51,620 --> 00:47:53,340 on how this all works, right? 906 00:47:53,340 --> 00:47:56,740 So maybe you'd be great to circle back to that now. 907 00:47:56,740 --> 00:47:58,900 Like, so we've kind of, we're in this situation 908 00:47:58,900 --> 00:48:01,940 where you've made these seminal findings. 909 00:48:01,940 --> 00:48:04,420 They've been discussed. 910 00:48:04,420 --> 00:48:07,500 Obviously, people have got different perspectives. 911 00:48:07,500 --> 00:48:11,660 And then now you're in this recent TICS paper 912 00:48:11,660 --> 00:48:13,660 that you were mentioning before… 913 00:48:13,660 --> 00:48:15,980 I'm talking about before… 914 00:48:15,980 --> 00:48:18,780 you've kind of started to sharpen, I'd 915 00:48:18,780 --> 00:48:22,340 say, your theory of how bilingualism 916 00:48:22,340 --> 00:48:24,620 confers an advantage. 917 00:48:24,620 --> 00:48:26,700 Would you say that, is that like in response 918 00:48:26,700 --> 00:48:29,740 to the 20 years of literature, or is it just really 919 00:48:29,740 --> 00:48:32,900 your own thinking evolving over time? 920 00:48:32,900 --> 00:48:34,460 Oh, it's both, really. 921 00:48:34,460 --> 00:48:40,020 I mean, you know, you're always responding to what's out there. 922 00:48:40,020 --> 00:48:42,580 Well, can I just add one more thing 923 00:48:42,580 --> 00:48:45,300 before we leave the Alzheimer's piece. 924 00:48:45,300 --> 00:48:48,420 There was one other study we did that I thought 925 00:48:48,420 --> 00:48:51,860 was a really important piece of the argument. 926 00:48:51,860 --> 00:48:53,100 It's a study I did 927 00:48:53,100 --> 00:48:54,700 I don't remember when it was published. 928 00:48:54,700 --> 00:48:59,340 The first author was my student, Matthias Berkes. 929 00:48:59,340 --> 00:49:02,220 And what he showed, he was also done 930 00:49:02,220 --> 00:49:08,940 through records, he showed that monolinguals and bilingual. 931 00:49:08,940 --> 00:49:12,420 We've talked about how bilinguals hold on longer, 932 00:49:12,420 --> 00:49:17,540 diagnosed later, have worse brains for the same cognitive level. 933 00:49:17,540 --> 00:49:24,420 But then, when they inevitably decline, it's more precipitous. 934 00:49:24,420 --> 00:49:28,460 And that makes perfect sense if the idea is they've 935 00:49:28,460 --> 00:49:31,420 been holding back the dam. 936 00:49:31,420 --> 00:49:33,660 You can only do it for so long. 937 00:49:33,660 --> 00:49:38,140 So, what have bilinguals been doing before they were diagnosed, 938 00:49:38,140 --> 00:49:40,500 you know, all that stuff? 939 00:49:40,500 --> 00:49:46,660 Their minds and brains have been somehow compensating, coping 940 00:49:46,660 --> 00:49:49,700 in ways that they could only do up to a point. 941 00:49:49,700 --> 00:49:53,180 So that's the bilingualism piece. 942 00:49:53,180 --> 00:49:55,900 So, what did you guys find in that paper about the rate 943 00:49:55,900 --> 00:49:56,420 of decline? 944 00:49:56,420 --> 00:49:57,580 Can you just clarify that? 945 00:49:57,580 --> 00:49:59,980 Yeah, the rate of, we looked at, 946 00:49:59,980 --> 00:50:02,660 we took rate to be the time it took 947 00:50:02,660 --> 00:50:11,100 to go from a visual diagnosis of MCI to full-blown Alzheimer's. 948 00:50:11,100 --> 00:50:16,460 And it was significantly shorter for the bilinguals. 949 00:50:16,460 --> 00:50:22,420 So, once they're on the train, the decline was steeper. 950 00:50:22,420 --> 00:50:24,340 OK, that's fascinating. 951 00:50:24,340 --> 00:50:28,100 So why do you think the advantage didn't continue to haul? 952 00:50:28,100 --> 00:50:31,060 Like, it's almost like after the dam burst, 953 00:50:31,060 --> 00:50:32,340 there was no longer an advantage. 954 00:50:32,340 --> 00:50:33,780 And the monolinguals caught up. 955 00:50:33,780 --> 00:50:36,540 Or did they not fully catch up? 956 00:50:36,540 --> 00:50:38,740 I think everybody meets at an end point. 957 00:50:38,740 --> 00:50:40,020 Everybody meets an end point. 958 00:50:40,020 --> 00:50:43,540 But do the bilinguals remain preserved at… 959 00:50:43,540 --> 00:50:44,860 Up and up to a point. 960 00:50:44,860 --> 00:50:50,740 The early and mid-stages of the disease, they do. 961 00:50:50,740 --> 00:50:56,020 We tried at one point testing more advanced patients, 962 00:50:56,020 --> 00:50:57,300 but it was impossible. 963 00:50:57,300 --> 00:50:57,800 Oh, yeah. 964 00:50:57,800 --> 00:51:00,260 So, the prediction is that once you get 965 00:51:00,260 --> 00:51:04,260 beyond the sort of moderate disease level, 966 00:51:04,260 --> 00:51:09,420 if you would be able to continue giving them detailed tests, 967 00:51:09,420 --> 00:51:14,260 the bilingual gap would close down because they're catching up. 968 00:51:14,260 --> 00:51:15,740 That's the prediction. 969 00:51:15,740 --> 00:51:17,060 But it was terrible. 970 00:51:17,060 --> 00:51:20,420 I mean, we had one time a wonderful research assistant, 971 00:51:20,420 --> 00:51:23,020 and we sent her into people's homes, 972 00:51:23,020 --> 00:51:25,660 where there was a patient with Alzheimer's 973 00:51:25,660 --> 00:51:28,340 and she had all these tests she was supposed to give them. 974 00:51:28,340 --> 00:51:29,580 It was hopeless. Couldn’t do them. 975 00:51:29,580 --> 00:51:31,380 Yeah. 976 00:51:31,380 --> 00:51:32,860 I mean, I understand. 977 00:51:32,860 --> 00:51:35,580 I mean, I did my postdoc in a dementia center, 978 00:51:35,580 --> 00:51:37,900 and it was very eye-opening. 979 00:51:37,900 --> 00:51:43,820 And yeah, it's a very difficult population to work with. 980 00:51:43,820 --> 00:51:46,140 Right now, I work primarily with Stroke, 981 00:51:46,140 --> 00:51:50,540 which is much more oddly a happy population to work with, 982 00:51:50,540 --> 00:51:52,900 because they're tending to be on a positive trajectory. 983 00:51:52,900 --> 00:51:54,140 They're on a positive trajectory. Yeah, they recover. Exactly. 984 00:51:54,140 --> 00:51:59,140 And yeah, and dementia that's certainly not the case. 985 00:51:59,140 --> 00:51:59,660 OK, yeah. 986 00:51:59,660 --> 00:52:03,700 So yeah, thanks for sharing that piece of the puzzle as well. 987 00:52:03,700 --> 00:52:07,380 I think that's an important part of the story. 988 00:52:07,380 --> 00:52:10,060 So maybe the last paper I'd like to talk about, 989 00:52:10,060 --> 00:52:12,140 yeah, you already mentioned it earlier. 990 00:52:12,140 --> 00:52:15,780 It's this recent TICS paper where you talk about mechanisms. 991 00:52:15,780 --> 00:52:17,980 And first of all, I mean, I kind of just 992 00:52:17,980 --> 00:52:23,420 wowed by the fact that you're still writing theoretical, 993 00:52:23,420 --> 00:52:26,900 After so long in this field, you are just not, 994 00:52:26,900 --> 00:52:27,740 you can't hold still. 995 00:52:27,740 --> 00:52:30,900 You're still like revising your views and so on. 996 00:52:30,900 --> 00:52:32,220 That's very cool. 997 00:52:32,220 --> 00:52:35,580 So, in this paper, you kind of contrast 998 00:52:35,580 --> 00:52:39,220 a transfer view of what the mechanism could be 999 00:52:39,220 --> 00:52:41,500 versus an adaptation view. 1000 00:52:41,500 --> 00:52:43,340 And I know you will mentioned this earlier, 1001 00:52:43,340 --> 00:52:45,380 but can you kind of flesh out those two possibilities 1002 00:52:45,380 --> 00:52:49,140 and explain why you come down on one side rather than the other? 1003 00:52:49,140 --> 00:52:50,220 OK. 1004 00:52:50,220 --> 00:52:56,060 So, when the research started accumulating, 1005 00:52:56,060 --> 00:52:59,420 and there was some interest in figuring out why bilinguals 1006 00:52:59,420 --> 00:53:04,100 are doing these asks better, executive function tasks, 1007 00:53:04,100 --> 00:53:07,300 better than, why would being bilingual 1008 00:53:07,300 --> 00:53:10,100 make you better at a Stroop task or a Simon task? 1009 00:53:10,100 --> 00:53:13,300 I mean, it doesn't really make a lot of sense. 1010 00:53:13,300 --> 00:53:18,660 So, in the, I guess early '80s to mid '80s, 1011 00:53:18,660 --> 00:53:23,340 there was a huge amount of psycholinguistic research 1012 00:53:23,340 --> 00:53:27,340 showing that both languages in a bilingual mind 1013 00:53:27,340 --> 00:53:28,700 are constantly active. 1014 00:53:28,700 --> 00:53:30,780 There's no language switch. 1015 00:53:30,780 --> 00:53:35,020 So, there's a constant need to select, 1016 00:53:35,020 --> 00:53:36,900 because bilinguals don't make mistakes. 1017 00:53:36,900 --> 00:53:39,900 They don't slip into the wrong language. 1018 00:53:39,900 --> 00:53:43,020 There is a constant need to select. 1019 00:53:43,020 --> 00:53:47,780 And people talked about that as inhibition. 1020 00:53:47,780 --> 00:53:52,180 And this was the language that these researchers were using 1021 00:53:52,180 --> 00:53:57,020 that bilinguals inhibit the unwanted language. 1022 00:53:57,020 --> 00:54:00,580 So, I thought, it just kind of made sense to me. 1023 00:54:00,580 --> 00:54:04,220 All right, they're inhibiting the unwanted language. 1024 00:54:04,220 --> 00:54:06,860 I'm not a linguist, again. 1025 00:54:06,860 --> 00:54:10,540 But when I see the performance on these tests, 1026 00:54:10,540 --> 00:54:16,220 like the Stroop task, you have to inhibit reading the word 1027 00:54:16,220 --> 00:54:19,940 in the Simon task that I described earlier. 1028 00:54:19,940 --> 00:54:24,220 You have to inhibit responding to the side 1029 00:54:24,220 --> 00:54:26,220 that's flashing with the stimulus. 1030 00:54:26,220 --> 00:54:29,900 So, I thought, maybe what's happening 1031 00:54:29,900 --> 00:54:37,380 is that constantly having to inhibit the non-target language 1032 00:54:37,380 --> 00:54:41,620 just makes bilinguals better at inhibition. 1033 00:54:41,620 --> 00:54:44,300 So that was my first guess. 1034 00:54:44,300 --> 00:54:48,220 I didn't think it was a terrible guess, but turns out to be wrong. 1035 00:54:48,220 --> 00:54:55,060 But anyway, I thought inhibition somehow is boosted, 1036 00:54:55,060 --> 00:55:00,420 and it's then more available no matter what you need to inhibit. 1037 00:55:00,420 --> 00:55:04,940 But then lots of stuff challenged that story. 1038 00:55:04,940 --> 00:55:07,900 The story didn't hold up for lots of reasons. 1039 00:55:07,900 --> 00:55:10,660 And we take too much time to go through it all. 1040 00:55:10,660 --> 00:55:11,460 Just briefly, though. 1041 00:55:11,460 --> 00:55:14,260 I think the important reasons, yeah. 1042 00:55:14,260 --> 00:55:14,900 All right. 1043 00:55:14,900 --> 00:55:17,140 So, here's a couple of examples. 1044 00:55:17,140 --> 00:55:24,780 I mentioned earlier that bilingualism begins 1045 00:55:24,780 --> 00:55:30,500 to impact mind and brain from the moment of birth. 1046 00:55:30,500 --> 00:55:35,660 There’re cool, cool studies with infants, six-month-old infants, 1047 00:55:35,660 --> 00:55:38,500 eight-month-old infants. 1048 00:55:38,500 --> 00:55:41,140 Infants don't speak. 1049 00:55:41,140 --> 00:55:44,220 They're not inhibiting anything. 1050 00:55:44,220 --> 00:55:50,860 So, it isn't just you try to tap down French, 1051 00:55:50,860 --> 00:55:52,620 because we're speaking English. 1052 00:55:52,620 --> 00:55:54,260 So, inhibition didn't work there. 1053 00:55:54,260 --> 00:56:01,420 Second, a lot of the studies first with children 1054 00:56:01,420 --> 00:56:05,100 and then with young adults showed that inhibition 1055 00:56:05,100 --> 00:56:07,540 isn't one thing anyway. 1056 00:56:07,540 --> 00:56:10,860 And so, if you're looking for differences 1057 00:56:10,860 --> 00:56:13,260 between monolinguals and bilinguals 1058 00:56:13,260 --> 00:56:18,540 and your hypothesis is that it's inhibition, 1059 00:56:18,540 --> 00:56:20,660 you're not going to find it all the time 1060 00:56:20,660 --> 00:56:23,260 because there's different kinds of inhibition. 1061 00:56:23,260 --> 00:56:30,700 And so, we then started to zoom in on a more detailed understanding 1062 00:56:30,700 --> 00:56:36,380 of what sort of inhibition in a task is handled better 1063 00:56:36,380 --> 00:56:37,380 by bilinguals. 1064 00:56:37,380 --> 00:56:41,620 So, inhibition is a big thing didn't work. 1065 00:56:41,620 --> 00:56:44,220 Then you get to the older adults. 1066 00:56:44,220 --> 00:56:48,940 Why would inhibiting a language all your life 1067 00:56:48,940 --> 00:56:54,140 help preserve your cognitive level in older age 1068 00:56:54,140 --> 00:56:56,860 and then into dementia? 1069 00:56:56,860 --> 00:56:58,980 Again, it didn't make any sense. 1070 00:56:58,980 --> 00:57:01,900 So, the inhibition story didn't hold together, 1071 00:57:01,900 --> 00:57:07,420 but that was the one that became adopted by the field. 1072 00:57:07,420 --> 00:57:08,660 And it is really easy. 1073 00:57:08,660 --> 00:57:10,340 I mean, you got all these students out there 1074 00:57:10,340 --> 00:57:12,220 and they have to do experiments. 1075 00:57:12,220 --> 00:57:14,540 So, they say, I'm going to give monolinguals 1076 00:57:14,540 --> 00:57:16,860 and bilinguals an inhibition task. 1077 00:57:16,860 --> 00:57:21,300 Oh, look, there's no difference because it was the wrong prediction. 1078 00:57:21,300 --> 00:57:24,420 So, inhibition took on a life of its own 1079 00:57:24,420 --> 00:57:29,500 and I tried to understand what was going on. 1080 00:57:29,500 --> 00:57:31,020 And I just-- 1081 00:57:31,020 --> 00:57:33,740 Sorry, can I just make sure I'm understanding, right? 1082 00:57:33,740 --> 00:57:38,300 So, this view is like that the driving effect 1083 00:57:38,300 --> 00:57:43,380 is like the transfer of some skill from being bilingual 1084 00:57:43,380 --> 00:57:47,060 and the skill and question that the transfer is inhibition. 1085 00:57:47,060 --> 00:57:50,980 And if that's your view, then if that's not the explanation, 1086 00:57:50,980 --> 00:57:53,380 then that might actually explain some of the no results 1087 00:57:53,380 --> 00:57:56,940 from people who've argued against an advantage 1088 00:57:56,940 --> 00:58:01,020 for bilinguals in aging if I'm phrasing it OK. 1089 00:58:01,020 --> 00:58:02,940 Because they might be looking at things 1090 00:58:02,940 --> 00:58:05,700 where you actually wouldn't necessarily even predict 1091 00:58:05,700 --> 00:58:07,980 that the bilinguals' advantage would show itself. 1092 00:58:07,980 --> 00:58:09,860 So, you're going to have a different concept 1093 00:58:09,860 --> 00:58:12,740 of where the advantage comes from, if this is, 1094 00:58:12,740 --> 00:58:13,820 Exactly right. 1095 00:58:13,820 --> 00:58:17,580 And if inhibition isn't the thing, then you shouldn't expect 1096 00:58:17,580 --> 00:58:20,740 bilinguals to transfer inhibition to everything 1097 00:58:20,740 --> 00:58:23,300 you throw at them that happens to require 1098 00:58:23,300 --> 00:58:24,780 what you want to call inhibition. 1099 00:58:24,780 --> 00:58:25,620 OK, so… 1100 00:58:25,620 --> 00:58:30,900 So, looking in the wrong place, I now describe that as looking 1101 00:58:30,900 --> 00:58:32,460 in the wrong place. 1102 00:58:32,460 --> 00:58:33,700 It wasn't inhibition. 1103 00:58:33,700 --> 00:58:35,780 But there was something. 1104 00:58:35,780 --> 00:58:39,220 And it really started to make sense when we 1105 00:58:39,220 --> 00:58:41,380 added the brain science. 1106 00:58:41,380 --> 00:58:44,420 Because bilinguals, 1107 00:58:44,420 --> 00:58:47,660 I mean, there's a lot of stuff on structural differences 1108 00:58:47,660 --> 00:58:50,420 between monolingual and bilingual brains. 1109 00:58:50,420 --> 00:58:54,660 But I think the more important stuff is the functional stuff. 1110 00:58:54,660 --> 00:59:00,900 So once neuroimaging was added to these studies, 1111 00:59:00,900 --> 00:59:05,740 it was very clear that even if the behavioral results 1112 00:59:05,740 --> 00:59:12,700 were identical, the functional connectivity was not. 1113 00:59:12,700 --> 00:59:18,260 Bunch of EEG studies that clearly show whether or not 1114 00:59:18,260 --> 00:59:22,100 there are differences in accuracy and reaction time 1115 00:59:22,100 --> 00:59:28,620 bilinguals are performing these tasks with less effort. 1116 00:59:28,620 --> 00:59:34,300 It was less effortful, even if the behavioral outcomes 1117 00:59:34,300 --> 00:59:35,780 were the same. 1118 00:59:35,780 --> 00:59:40,220 And then you've got other studies with connectivity 1119 00:59:40,220 --> 00:59:45,500 in fMRI, white matter tracts, functional connectivity 1120 00:59:45,500 --> 00:59:47,900 at rest, really interesting stuff. 1121 00:59:47,900 --> 00:59:51,300 bilingual brains were wired differently. 1122 00:59:51,300 --> 00:59:53,180 Yeah, thank you, Daniela Perani's 1123 00:59:53,180 --> 00:59:54,460 work there, probably. 1124 00:59:54,460 --> 00:59:56,460 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. 1125 00:59:56,460 --> 00:59:56,980 Yeah. 1126 00:59:56,980 --> 00:59:57,460 OK. 1127 00:59:57,460 --> 01:00:01,220 So, if the brain is wired differently, 1128 01:00:01,220 --> 01:00:05,420 it has a different level of preparedness 1129 01:00:05,420 --> 01:00:09,180 for the tasks in which it will engage. 1130 01:00:09,180 --> 01:00:11,980 So, the crucial thing is no longer 1131 01:00:11,980 --> 01:00:14,220 who can do a Stroop task faster. 1132 01:00:14,220 --> 01:00:15,780 That's not important. 1133 01:00:15,780 --> 01:00:20,660 The crucial thing is what does the preparedness of the brain 1134 01:00:20,660 --> 01:00:22,260 look like? 1135 01:00:22,260 --> 01:00:26,780 And this, I think, is the key to understanding 1136 01:00:26,780 --> 01:00:30,420 effects in older age and dementia. 1137 01:00:30,420 --> 01:00:34,820 The bilingual brain has better connectivity 1138 01:00:34,820 --> 01:00:40,980 and a more active state at rest. 1139 01:00:40,980 --> 01:00:45,540 And when it's doing a task, the EEG tells us 1140 01:00:45,540 --> 01:00:48,100 they don't have to try as hard. 1141 01:00:48,100 --> 01:00:52,140 So, this is a preservation on the brain 1142 01:00:52,140 --> 01:00:56,620 that takes them further into aging without losing 1143 01:00:56,620 --> 01:01:00,140 cognitive position. 1144 01:01:00,140 --> 01:01:02,900 OK, so that's the adaptation account 1145 01:01:02,900 --> 01:01:05,140 that the brain is that the bilingual environment 1146 01:01:05,140 --> 01:01:08,900 creates a more efficient, intentional system 1147 01:01:08,900 --> 01:01:11,460 that plays out in many different contexts, 1148 01:01:11,460 --> 01:01:13,580 not just in inhibition tasks. 1149 01:01:13,580 --> 01:01:18,500 And does it matter then, what kind of bilingual you are? 1150 01:01:18,500 --> 01:01:20,460 Like, is it better to be a simultaneous 1151 01:01:20,460 --> 01:01:22,740 bilingual or a sequential bilingual, for instance? 1152 01:01:22,740 --> 01:01:24,340 Like, what do you think about that? 1153 01:01:24,340 --> 01:01:24,940 Yeah. 1154 01:01:24,940 --> 01:01:28,300 So, this is also a big deal. 1155 01:01:28,300 --> 01:01:35,820 Because bilingualism is not a categorical concept, right? 1156 01:01:35,820 --> 01:01:40,220 And in the early studies we pretended it was, 1157 01:01:40,220 --> 01:01:43,860 the current research is much smarter 1158 01:01:43,860 --> 01:01:50,220 and treats it as a continuum with lots of ways 1159 01:01:50,220 --> 01:01:54,660 of measuring what moves you along the continuum. 1160 01:01:54,660 --> 01:01:59,220 So, lots of factors make bilingual experiences 1161 01:01:59,220 --> 01:02:04,860 across different people, age of onset, level of proficiency 1162 01:02:04,860 --> 01:02:07,500 who you speak to, in what context. 1163 01:02:07,500 --> 01:02:09,500 You know, all that matters. 1164 01:02:09,500 --> 01:02:11,940 And we haven't even talked about multilingualism, right? 1165 01:02:11,940 --> 01:02:14,660 I mean, that's not going to make it. 1166 01:02:14,660 --> 01:02:15,820 Let's not. 1167 01:02:15,820 --> 01:02:16,340 Not today. 1168 01:02:16,340 --> 01:02:21,620 The bottom line is bilingualism is a continuum 1169 01:02:21,620 --> 01:02:26,420 and degree of bilingualism matters greatly, depending, 1170 01:02:26,420 --> 01:02:28,380 you know, however you measure it. 1171 01:02:28,380 --> 01:02:32,700 And studies in the last five or so years 1172 01:02:32,700 --> 01:02:36,740 look at regressions or correlations 1173 01:02:36,740 --> 01:02:40,020 between degree of bilingualism and the outcomes. 1174 01:02:40,020 --> 01:02:46,340 So, it's calibrated to degree of bilingual experience. 1175 01:02:46,340 --> 01:02:49,740 OK, so the particular bilingual environment certainly 1176 01:02:49,740 --> 01:02:53,100 is going to matter according to this theory. 1177 01:02:53,100 --> 01:02:57,020 OK, I have one last question for you, if I may. 1178 01:02:57,020 --> 01:03:00,100 Do you think that, you know, given your findings, 1179 01:03:00,100 --> 01:03:02,500 do you think that a prospective intervention 1180 01:03:02,500 --> 01:03:08,300 would be worth exploring? Could learning a language later in life, 1181 01:03:08,300 --> 01:03:10,100 Specifically, because you want 1182 01:03:10,100 --> 01:03:12,540 to stave off dementia? 1183 01:03:12,540 --> 01:03:15,300 Is that a clinical trial that you'd like to see done? 1184 01:03:15,300 --> 01:03:16,060 Right. 1185 01:03:16,060 --> 01:03:18,660 So, I have two answers to your question. 1186 01:03:18,660 --> 01:03:23,500 First, we did a little training study that was very cute. 1187 01:03:23,500 --> 01:03:26,460 This was with the colleague of mine, Jed Meltzer. 1188 01:03:26,460 --> 01:03:28,500 So, we had older adults who were monolingual 1189 01:03:28,500 --> 01:03:29,820 when we trained them on stuff. 1190 01:03:29,820 --> 01:03:33,860 And by the end of the training study, 1191 01:03:33,860 --> 01:03:41,100 the group who spent 16 weeks learning Spanish on Duolingo 1192 01:03:41,100 --> 01:03:42,580 performed better on these tasks. 1193 01:03:42,580 --> 01:03:44,420 So that's kind of a demonstration. 1194 01:03:44,420 --> 01:03:45,900 But my real answer is, 1195 01:03:46,340 --> 01:03:51,980 what's hard for your brain is good for your brain. 1196 01:03:51,980 --> 01:03:55,420 So, to stave off dementia, we know all the things we need to do. 1197 01:03:55,420 --> 01:03:57,260 Everybody knows the list. 1198 01:03:57,260 --> 01:04:01,500 You've got to be active, engaged, busy, you've got to read, 1199 01:04:01,500 --> 01:04:05,020 you've got to do cross-word puzzles, you've got to do all these things. 1200 01:04:05,020 --> 01:04:08,980 And the reason is you've got to keep your brain alive. 1201 01:04:08,980 --> 01:04:15,060 So, bilingualism, learning a language in older age, is hard. 1202 01:04:15,060 --> 01:04:19,660 So, learning a language in older age is good for your brain. 1203 01:04:19,660 --> 01:04:21,980 But it will not make you bilingual. 1204 01:04:21,980 --> 01:04:24,980 It will be good for your brain just because it's 1205 01:04:24,980 --> 01:04:29,820 one of those activities that you need to keep doing to keep 1206 01:04:29,820 --> 01:04:32,580 your brain alive. 1207 01:04:32,580 --> 01:04:33,420 Yes, but… 1208 01:04:33,420 --> 01:04:37,460 OK, so you don't see that as creating a bilingual environment 1209 01:04:37,460 --> 01:04:42,620 of the sort that you theorize creates that lifelong protection. 1210 01:04:42,620 --> 01:04:47,220 Well, people want to know, it will help. 1211 01:04:47,220 --> 01:04:47,820 I mean… 1212 01:04:47,820 --> 01:04:48,860 Yeah, I understand. 1213 01:04:48,860 --> 01:04:49,860 That is there. 1214 01:04:49,860 --> 01:04:52,660 But people ask me this question because they 1215 01:04:52,660 --> 01:04:54,900 want to become bilingual. 1216 01:04:54,900 --> 01:04:57,620 And so, I think it just kind of be a little more realistic 1217 01:04:57,620 --> 01:05:01,540 about what's possible, but absolutely learn another languages. 1218 01:05:01,540 --> 01:05:03,180 But it's a great activity. 1219 01:05:03,180 --> 01:05:05,660 Yeah, but you don't, yeah. 1220 01:05:05,660 --> 01:05:09,260 And I guess what I'm saying is like you think it has virtue 1221 01:05:09,260 --> 01:05:12,620 but because it's cognitively challenging, but it doesn't create 1222 01:05:12,620 --> 01:05:15,260 the kind of bilingual brain that you're talking about 1223 01:05:15,260 --> 01:05:17,980 that would have that long term resilience built in. 1224 01:05:17,980 --> 01:05:18,980 Yes, that is it. 1225 01:05:18,980 --> 01:05:24,100 OK, so it's too late for all of us that have failed to become bilingual 1226 01:05:24,100 --> 01:05:26,460 when we had the chance. 1227 01:05:26,460 --> 01:05:27,300 That's OK. 1228 01:05:27,300 --> 01:05:29,140 I can live with that. 1229 01:05:29,140 --> 01:05:31,220 It's still good for your brain. 1230 01:05:31,220 --> 01:05:32,740 Yeah. 1231 01:05:32,740 --> 01:05:35,300 It probably is. 1232 01:05:35,300 --> 01:05:37,980 All right, well, thank you so much for your time. 1233 01:05:37,980 --> 01:05:41,020 What was really fun to talk about these things. 1234 01:05:41,020 --> 01:05:44,140 Bilingualism is just, like whenever I ever tell anybody 1235 01:05:44,140 --> 01:05:48,020 in like civilian life that I work on language in the brain, 1236 01:05:48,020 --> 01:05:51,180 they almost always ask questions related to bilingualism 1237 01:05:51,180 --> 01:05:51,900 or multilingualism. 1238 01:05:51,900 --> 01:05:52,420 Oh, really? 1239 01:05:52,420 --> 01:05:53,700 For some reason, that's the most fascinating, 1240 01:05:53,700 --> 01:05:55,860 and that's the most asked topic that I get. 1241 01:05:55,860 --> 01:05:56,420 What do they ask? 1242 01:05:56,420 --> 01:05:57,660 What are the questions they ask you? 1243 01:05:57,660 --> 01:06:00,020 The most common question would probably 1244 01:06:00,020 --> 01:06:02,940 be like if I speak two languages, are they 1245 01:06:02,940 --> 01:06:04,860 processed in different parts of my brain? 1246 01:06:04,860 --> 01:06:05,860 I think 1247 01:06:05,860 --> 01:06:09,180 oddly enough, I think that's not a question 1248 01:06:09,180 --> 01:06:11,980 that we actually fully know the answer to. 1249 01:06:11,980 --> 01:06:14,180 But that's probably a topic for another day. 1250 01:06:14,180 --> 01:06:16,100 But yeah, people love this topic. 1251 01:06:16,100 --> 01:06:19,300 And I don't think I've done a podcast on it before. 1252 01:06:19,300 --> 01:06:20,300 So, I think people are going to be interested in this. 1253 01:06:20,300 --> 01:06:21,980 Well, you have had Cathy Price. 1254 01:06:21,980 --> 01:06:24,580 And she's done some really important bilingualism stuff. 1255 01:06:24,580 --> 01:06:27,340 Yeah, I think, but I don't think we necessarily 1256 01:06:27,340 --> 01:06:28,780 talked about that on the podcast. 1257 01:06:28,780 --> 01:06:32,180 But yeah, no, I mean, Cathy Price has worked on everything. 1258 01:06:32,180 --> 01:06:33,780 I could have a podcast where I'd only 1259 01:06:33,780 --> 01:06:36,260 talk to Cathy Price each week, and we'd 1260 01:06:36,260 --> 01:06:38,180 stay busy for a long time. 1261 01:06:38,180 --> 01:06:40,180 But yeah, I think people are going to really find this 1262 01:06:40,180 --> 01:06:41,540 interesting as I did. 1263 01:06:41,540 --> 01:06:43,260 So, thank you so much. 1264 01:06:43,260 --> 01:06:44,300 Thank you very much for inviting me. 1265 01:06:44,300 --> 01:06:45,420 I really enjoyed it. 1266 01:06:45,420 --> 01:06:46,060 Yeah, all right. 1267 01:06:46,060 --> 01:06:46,780 Well take care. 1268 01:06:46,780 --> 01:06:49,260 And I look forward to hopefully meeting you 1269 01:06:49,260 --> 01:06:50,980 in real life at some point. 1270 01:06:50,980 --> 01:06:52,020 OK, bye-bye. 1271 01:06:52,020 --> 01:06:53,300 OK, bye. 1272 01:06:53,300 --> 01:06:55,500 OK, well, that's it for episode 36. 1273 01:06:55,500 --> 01:06:57,260 Thank you, Ellen, for joining me on the podcast. 1274 01:06:57,260 --> 01:06:59,060 This was a really fun conversation. 1275 01:06:59,060 --> 01:07:01,460 I've linked the papers we discussed in the show notes. 1276 01:07:01,460 --> 01:07:05,980 And on the podcast website at langneurosci.org/podcast. 1277 01:07:05,980 --> 01:07:07,940 Thank you to Marcia Petyt for editing the transcript 1278 01:07:07,940 --> 01:07:10,340 of this episode and thank you all for listening. 1279 01:07:10,340 --> 01:07:12,420 Bye for now and see you next time. 1280 01:07:12,420 --> 01:07:15,420 [MUSIC PLAYING] 1281 01:07:15,420 --> 01:07:45,420 [MUSIC PLAYING]