Health & Fitness
Study: Bilingualism makes the brain sharper
TBO.com
Staff
Published: May 12, 2012
For a sharper, more attentive mind, a new study recommends that you learn a new language.Staff
Published: May 12, 2012
Bilingualism, according to a study published in the April 30 issue of PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, pnas.org), enhances the auditory nervous system, memory and attention.
Bilingualism expert Viorica Marian and neuroscientist Nina Kraus, both of Northwestern University, led the study. They found that the ability to speak two languages changed the way the nervous system responds to sound.
"It seems that the benefits of bilingualism are particularly powerful and broad, and include attention, inhibition and encoding of sound," Marian said.
For the study, the researchers played the sounds of speech to 23 teenagers who speak both English and Spanish and to 25 English-only speaking teenagers. The speech sounds were played twice — once in quiet conditions and once with background noise. They found that the bilingual participants were better able to distinguish the sounds of speech from background noise than their English-only counterparts.
The Hartford (Conn.) Courant