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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

#61

Post by dang »

boulos wrote: post #38

The title has been editorialized unfortunately. The page uses Actively speaking two languages protects against cognitive impairment which is an important summary of the paper: everyone in the study is basically bilingual, but the bilingual composite score (how bilingual you are / how much you actively speak and switch languages) is suggested as a precursor of delayed cognitive decline. The title of the original paper…

Ah thanks. We've changed the title now. Submitted title was "Dementia 50% lower in bilingual populations".

Submitters: please follow the site guidelines, which include: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Actively speaking two languages protects against cognitive impairment

#62

Post by irjustin »

ip26 wrote: post #41
bluejellybean wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm not sure which side to take on this issue. I think both can be right, but I lean towards agreement with the root comment.

Root parent comment is right to question if the N=266 is truly random given the description we do have at hand.

You are right to say N=266 could be truly random and we don't have enough information to definitively decide either way.

We can't read the study so it's just what we have - saying you have a truly random sample with a group just from Barcelona is extremely hard to accept. I mean even you've got to admit that.

Re: Actively speaking two languages protects against cognitive impairment

#63

Post by wongarsu »

drumttocs8 wrote: post #59
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.

Can you explain how N=27 could possibly represent and be extended to billions of humans? It is certainly not intuitive to me.

Assuming you take 27 people from all over the world at random, and all 27 of them have two legs, you can be fairly certain that most humans have two legs. You might also conclude that about 50% are male and about 60% are from Asia, but as traits get less frequent your error bars get bigger and bigger.

Of course actually picking 27 random people is extremely hard, so actual studies compensate by picking more people.

Re: Actively speaking two languages protects against cognitive impairment

#64

Post by lolc »

andy_ppp wrote: post #24
drdrey wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are immigrants and their children likely to be richer, eat better, etc?

There would need to be research done, nothing has been said if these people were all immigrants to Barcelona or the wages they were on, my guess is they are probably not truly random and replication will be difficult if we chose say bilingual in Wales, for example.

This study was not about an immigrant population: "we looked at whether in Barcelona – where everyone is more or less bilingual..."

Re: Actively speaking two languages protects against cognitive impairment

#65

Post by lolc »

aurelianito wrote: post #25

Almost everyone is bilingual in Barcelona. They teach Catalan and Spanish at school, and both are spoken by the general population. How did they get non-bilingual people there?

"Therefore, unlike in previous studies, the researchers established a bilingualism gradient: from people who speak only one language but are passively exposed to another, to individuals who have excellent proficiency in both and use them indiscriminately on a day-to-day basis. To create this gradient, several variables were taken into account, including the age of acquisition of the second language, the use made of each language, and switching between languages in the same context."

Re: Actively speaking two languages protects against cognitive impairment

#66

Post by mikeomoto »

This study tries to explain why "some studies have failed to show this bilingual advantage, suggesting that it might depend on the type and degree of bilingualism", by laying out evidence for the "type and degree of bilingualism.

Here are the facts that the article established:

- Lifelong degree of bilingualism predicts delay in age of onset for all clinical measure of Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI).

- This is NOT true for Alzheimer's Disease patients.

- This prediction was independent of occupation, education, and job attainment.

The second bullet point isn't properly emphasized in the article, but it's directly from the abstract.

The researcher has a hypothesis that multilingualism improves Cognitive Reserve [1], and, and Cognitive Reserve has already been established to have an effect on the timeline of Alzheimer's disease related pathology. [2]

That being said, it's also true that "AD is the most common etiology of MCI and mild dementia" [3], and the researcher has a hypothesis that the multilingualism improves Cognitive Reserve.

Based on the existing hypothesis of how CR and AD interact, the lack of correlation in AD patients could make sense, and should not be seen as counter-evidence to the bilingualism increases CR hypothesis.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_reserve

[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3507991/#S2titl...

[3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4185370/#S5titl...

Re: Actively speaking two languages protects against cognitive impairment

#67

Post by wongarsu »

andy_ppp wrote: post #28
tropdrop wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think this doesn’t disprove the theory I’ve set out that people who know more languages than the average local population are likely to have other markers correlated with lower Alzheimer’s risk.

It's not about knowing more languages (I would be surprised to learn that they only knew two, after all it's Europe). This paper instead studies differences between people who actually use multiple languages, against people who don't.

There's still corellation here, like professions where the lingua franca isn't the local language (programming, medicine, music (to some degree), sciences, etc). The paper claims the effect appears equally strong in all occupations though.

Re: Actively speaking two languages protects against cognitive impairment

#68

Post by bobthepanda »

jedberg wrote: post #7
roenxi wrote: post #4

Interesting and suggestive, but difficult to interpret from the publicly available information. Actively speaking two languages no doubt implies complex correlations between wealth, status and circumstance. The paper abstract doesn't mention controlling for location. That would also be an interesting thing to test.

One of the first things it mentions is controlling for location -- they were all in Barcelona.

Which basically makes this a study of Catalan-Spanish bilingualism.

It would be interesting to see if this also applied to other combinations of languages.

Re: Actively speaking two languages protects against cognitive impairment

#70

Post by ekianjo »

This paper suggest causal effect but they have nothing but correlation. There may be other factord at play between people who are bilingual and those who are not. Would be surprising to say the least that one variable explains differences in dementia outcomes...
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