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Actively speaking two languages protects against cognitive impairment

uoc.edu

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Re: Actively speaking two languages protects against cognitive impairment

#41

Post by ip26 »

bluejellybean wrote: post #10
ip26 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With proper random sampling you only need something like N = 27 (I forget exactly) to reach p = 0.05 Assuming random sampling, it's a misconception that you need ten thousand participants to have a useful study.

Isn't the crux just that, "proper random sampling" can be quite hard. Assumptions are fine in theory, in reality, they can seriously throw us for a loop.

Right, so you really need to review the study's methodology to determine if N = 266 is actually enough or not. I am guessing my original parent did not conduct such a review.

Re: Actively speaking two languages protects against cognitive impairment

#42

Post by AmericanChopper »

andy_ppp wrote: post #13
trimbo wrote: post #3

> They recruited 63 healthy individuals, 135 patients with mild cognitive impairment such as memory loss, and 68 people with Alzheimer's – the most prevalent type of dementia – in four hospitals in Barcelona and the metropolitan area Wait so, N = 266? All from Barcelona? C'mon.

Yes, I haven’t read the paper but how can you control for correlated stuff here, e.g. bilingual people are likely to be richer, more intelligent, exercise more, eat better more varied food and have richer social lives. Maybe.

Have you got a source for any of that? I imagine a lot of demographic factors could confound such a study, but I don’t see why multilingual people would be richer/healthier/more educated. In a lot of western countries, I’d imagine a huge amount of the multilingual population would be made of less well off immigrants.

Re: Actively speaking two languages protects against cognitive impairment

#43

Post by School-Cotton »

7thaccount wrote: post #33
kingkawn wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The study is in Spain.

I got that. I was responding to someone saying speaking 2 languages correlates with wealth. I'm not sure how true that is as being bilingual is extremely common outside of the US.

Some googling suggests that about half the world population is bilingual. Certainly more than the rate in the US, but it's a bit of an exaggeration to imply that everyone in the world is bilingual except for the backwards Yanks.

Re: Actively speaking two languages protects against cognitive impairment

#45

Post by Etheryte »

Wolfenstein98k wrote: post #16

What does bilingualism correlate with?

Most of the world's population is multilingual [1], hence it doesn't correlate with much anything on a wider scale. The list of multilingual areas is very long and nuanced [2] and the implications and correlations in each location are as widely varied as the list itself.

As other commenters have already pointed out, the study took place in Barcelona, where multilingualism is prominent and doesn't correlate with any specific group or trait.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multilingualism#Myths

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_multilingual_countries...

Re: Actively speaking two languages protects against cognitive impairment

#46

Post by carbocation »

Table 1 shows various demographic factors broken down by disease vs no disease.

But since they're making claims about bilingualism vs no bilingualism, we also need to see a "Table 1" equivalent for those two categories, so we can understand at a glance which confounders are correlated with these values.

Secondarily, it's a bit concerning (for their hypothesis) that bilingualism is associated with less mild cognitive impairment but not with the more severe dementia phenotype.

Re: Actively speaking two languages protects against cognitive impairment

#47

Post by wombatmobile »

School-Cotton wrote: post #44
Wolfenstein98k wrote: post #16

What does bilingualism correlate with?

FWIW, the study was done in Barcelona, which (along with Montreal) is one of the most fully bilingual cities in the developed Western world.

So how does dementia incidence in Montreal compare with mono lingual regions?

Re: Actively speaking two languages protects against cognitive impairment

#48

Post by pvaldes »

tropdrop wrote: post #22
andy_ppp wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I haven’t read the paper but how can you control for correlated stuff here, e.g. bilingual people are likely to be richer, more intelligent, exercise more, eat better more varied food and have richer social lives. Maybe.

This is why they chose Barcelona, where the use of 2 languages (Catalan and Spanish) was "highly variable" and everyone in the city spoke or at least understood 2 languages: "We wanted to take advantage of this variability, and instead of comparing monolingual and bilingual people, we looked at whether in Barcelona – where everyone is more or less bilingual – there was a certain degree of bilingualism that had neurop…

Very obvious propaganda to promote an agenda, not more, not less.

And don't make me start to talking about how normal is the mental health of the same people that trashed and burned Barcelona last years, because they felt "oppressed" by a man that died 30 years before they born. Or the lobby trying to erase the history claiming than Leonardo Da Vinci, Cervantes and "put your name here" were really from Catalonia. Very sane behavior, for sure.

Trust me (or your gut if you prefer). You can find crazy people equally among bilingual, monolingual, translingual and people with just mischieving tongues. Just take a look at how mental asylums are distributed.

This is just one of thousands of articles that support a patriotic narrative so are published. Is politics disguised as science. The opposite idea would never reach the journals.

Re: Actively speaking two languages protects against cognitive impairment

#49

Post by School-Cotton »

wombatmobile wrote: post #47
School-Cotton wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW, the study was done in Barcelona, which (along with Montreal) is one of the most fully bilingual cities in the developed Western world.

So how does dementia incidence in Montreal compare with mono lingual regions?

I don't know. It would indeed be interesting to compare Montreal to Toronto or Vancouver.

Re: Actively speaking two languages protects against cognitive impairment

#50

Post by esperent »

airstrike wrote: post #26
trimbo wrote: post #3

> They recruited 63 healthy individuals, 135 patients with mild cognitive impairment such as memory loss, and 68 people with Alzheimer's – the most prevalent type of dementia – in four hospitals in Barcelona and the metropolitan area Wait so, N = 266? All from Barcelona? C'mon.

N = 266 isn't really that bad at all

What about N = 266, all from one city?
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