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What are the advantages of learning a foreign language? Can learning another language help prevent Alzheimer’s? Do language apps actually help?
Learning a second language is a big challenge for your brain. Research suggests it might be the right kind of challenge to boost your executive function, improve your cognitive skills, and even delay the symptoms of cognitive decline.
Here’s the psychological research behind learning another language.
Is Learning a Second Language Beneficial for Your Brain?
There are many advantages of learning a foreign language—communicating better during travels or when moving to a new country typically top the list. But research suggests there may be another compelling benefit: Learning a second language may improve your brain function.
What Happens in Your Brain When You Learn a New Language?
Learning a new language is a challenging task. Experts say that the brain undergoes many changes to adapt to a second language and to enable you to switch back and forth between the languages you speak. They’ve discovered that when you learn and use a second language, that language becomes “active” in your brain. In other words, it’s always accessible or “on.”
Your brain undergoes both structural and functional changes when switching between languages. Structural changes refer to alterations in the size and shape of different brain regions as well as the connections between them, while functional changes relate to how and how often brain regions are used.
These changes take place in regions of the brain that enable executive function: cognitive skills like working memory, mental flexibility, and self-control that enable you to focus your attention and manage complex tasks and goals.
Does Everyone’s Brain Adapt the Same Way?
Research suggests that people’s brains adapt to a second language in different ways, and to different degrees, depending on how they learned the language and how they use it. For example, your brain adapts differently if you start learning your second language in childhood versus in adulthood. It also learns to handle your second language more efficiently the longer you use it and the more frequently you switch between languages. Thus, the structural and functional changes of a person’s brain look different for someone who constantly switches between two languages compared to someone who uses their second language only occasionally or only under limited circumstances.
Can Learning a New Language Help With Brain Fog or Alzheimer’s?
Some people have found studying a second language helps them deal with brain fog. Some experts similarly have seen benefits for patients who have trouble remembering, concentrating, and making decisions. They attribute this effect to the fact that learning a language involves multiple cognitive processes, including listening, decoding, speaking, reading, and writing, and each of these processes involves a different region of the brain. Learning a new language also encourages the brain’s neuroplasticity: its ability to change and reorganize itself in response to experiences.
A growing body of research suggests that speaking two languages has a protective effect against Alzheimer’s disease. While people who speak multiple languages develop Alzheimer’s disease at the same rate as people who speak one language, the symptoms are consistently delayed for those who are multilingual—possibly for four to six years.
Researchers think this might be because learning a language can increase a person’s cognitive reserve—your brain’s ability to improvise, solve problems, and withstand damage. When you learn a new language, your brain builds new connections in the regions responsible for executive function. Those additional connections make the brains of bilingual people more resilient against the damage that occurs in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease.
Will a Language-Learning App Make You Smarter?
Some people hope that apps like Duolingo, Babbel, or Rosetta Stone can make it easy to reap the cognitive benefits of language-learning. A few studies support this, finding that language apps can boost working memory and information-processing.
But others are more skeptical of the effectiveness of these apps, noting that the vocabulary and grammar taught bear little resemblance to how people actually speak, and students using the apps rarely become proficient enough to carry on a conversation. They argue that there’s no substitute for real-life interactions when learning a language.
Wrapping Up
So, how beneficial is learning a second language? Experts agree that even if it comes with only modest cognitive benefits, its social benefits, like enabling you to communicate and build relationships with others, can greatly improve your life.
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