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So, now, my almost-monolingual brain is jealous. Speaking a single language beyond one's native tongue is enough to do the trick. Intriguingly, when a patient speaks three (or more) languages, no extra benefits accrue neurologically. The constant need in a bilingual person to selectively activate one language and suppress the other is thought to lead to a better development of executive functions and attentional tasks with cognitive advantages being best documented in attentional control, inhibition, and conflict resolution. Only when I read the research report itself, though, published in the journal Neurology and written by Suvarna Alladi and 7 co-authors, did I realize fully the brilliance of conducting this study in Hyderabad, India. It also claims to show that the benefit applies not only to Alzheimer's sufferers but also people with frontotemporal and vascular dementia.
![monolingual vs bilingual brain monolingual vs bilingual brain](https://www.futurescienceleaders.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/33B7090E-0115-46DA-BB79-7DB3F0CA205F.gif)
It's also touted as the first study to reveal that bilingual people who are illiterate derive the same benefit from speaking two languages as do people who read and write. Media reports emphasize the size of its cohort: 648 patients from a university hospital's memory clinic, including 391 who were bilingual. While knowledge of a protective effect of bilingualism isn't entirely new, the present study significantly advances scientists' knowledge.
![monolingual vs bilingual brain monolingual vs bilingual brain](https://i0.wp.com/cms.babbel.news/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/CM_BilingualLearning_1200-1.png)
Bilingual patients suffer dementia onset an average of 4.5 years later than those who speak only a single language. The largest study so far to ask whether speaking two languages might delay the onset of dementia symptoms in bilingual patients as compared to monolingual patients has reported a robust result. An Indian schoolgirl dressed as Telugu Talli poses for the camera during a celebration in Hyderabad, home to a study that seems to show the onset of dementia is delayed for people who speak more than one language.