PSYCHOLOGY Language skills and brain power

The test measured bilingual participants' ability to deal with distractions.
WASHINGTON POST
Bilingual speakers are better able to deal with distractions than those who speak only a single language, and that may help offset age-related declines in mental performance, researchers say.
In studies conducted in Canada, India and Hong Kong, psychologists determined that individuals who spoke two languages with equal proficiency and used both equally did better than monolingual volunteers on tests that measured how quickly they could perform while distracted.
"The bilingual advantage was greater for older participants," the researchers wrote in the journal Psychology and Aging, adding that "bilingualism appears to offset age-related losses" in certain mental processes.
The test
Researchers used the Simon task, a test used to measure mental abilities that are known to decline with age. Test-takers saw a red or a blue square flash on a computer screen and were told to depress one or the other of the two "shift" keys depending on which color appeared. As previous research has found, performance slowed when the colored squares moved from their original positions.
Three experiments showed that bilingual speakers of Cantonese and English, Tamil and English or French and English consistently outperformed English-only speakers, said the researchers at York University and the Rotman Research Institute in Toronto, and Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
The team, led by Ellen Bialystok at York University, hypothesized that the ability to hold two languages in the mind at the same time, without allowing words and grammar from one to slip into the other, might account for the greater control needed to perform well on the Simon task. An alternate hypothesis is that bilinguals have superior working memories for storing and processing information.