Over time, regularly speaking more than one language appears to strengthen skills that boost the brain’s so-called cognitive reserve, a capacity to work even when stressed or damaged. This build-up of cognitive reserve appears to help bilingual people as they age.

“Speaking two languages isn’t going to do anything to dodge the bullet” of getting Alzheimer’s disease or dementia, says Ellen Bialystok, Distinguished Research Professor in Psychology in 91��ɫ’s . But greater cognitive reserve means the “same as the reserve tank in a car: Once the brain runs out of fuel, it can go a little farther,” she says.

Specifically, the advantages of bilingualism are thought to be related to a brain function known as inhibitory or cognitive control: the ability to stop paying attention to one thing and focus on something else, says Bialystok. Fluent speakers of more than one language have to use this skill continually to silence one language in their minds while communicating in another.

. . .

Dr. Bialystok began her decades-long research by studying how children learn a second language. In 2004, she and her colleague Fergus Craik shifted to conduct three studies looking at the cognitive effects in some 150 monolingual and bilingual people between 30 and 80 years old.

They found that in both middle and old age, the bilingual subjects were better able to block out distracting information than the single-language speakers in a series of computerized tests. The advantage was even more pronounced in the older subjects.

Dr. Bialystok says other research also shows better performance from bilingual people on tests requiring cognitive control, such as when they are instructed to determine whether a sentence is grammatically correct, even if the content doesn't make sense.

For example, in distinguishing, "apples grow on trees" from "apple trees on grow" and "apples grow on noses," the third sentence requires people to focus on the structure and suppress paying attention to the meaning of the words.

The findings from the 2004 study led Dr. Bialystok to wonder whether these benefits might help older people compensate for age-related losses in learning.

She and her colleagues examined the medical records of 228 memory-clinic patients who had been diagnosed with different kinds of dementia, two-thirds with Alzheimer's disease.

The results, published in the journal in 2007, suggested that bilingual patients exhibit problematic memory problems later than those who only spoke one language.

Bilingual patients were, on average, four years older than single-language speakers when their families first noticed memory problems, or when the patient first came to the clinic seeking treatment.

Moreover, bilingual patients' memories were no worse than those of single-language speakers by the time they arrived at the clinic, and there was no difference in the length of time between the detection of symptoms and when the patients were first checked in.

In a subsequent study, Dr. Bialystok and her colleagues looked at brain images of monolingual and bilingual Alzheimer's patients at the same age and stage of disease.

They found that the brains of the bilingual people appeared to be in worse physical condition. This suggests that bilingualism doesn't delay the disease process itself, but rather helps bilingual individuals better handle memory deficits, Dr. Bialystok says.

. . .

Dr. Bialystok's group is now conducting a study testing patients every six months to measure the rate of mental decline over the course of dementia.

Bialystok's research was also covered by the Oct. 12.

Republished courtesy of YFile– 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin

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The sharp spike contrasts with little change in the short selling of companies that borrow money from banks, according to the research.

“Hedge fund lenders, like banks, are ‘quasi-insiders’ and thus privy to private information about the performance of borrowing firms,” the authors of the paper write. “However, hedge funds are not subject to the same degree of oversight and regulation as banks.”

“It’s impossible to know if it’s hedge funds that are doing the shorting, but our study raises important questions about regulating hedge funds when they make loans,” says Debarshi Nandy, Assistant Professor of Finance at , one of the co-authors of the paper. The other researchers are [Associate Professor] and [PhD candidate] Keke Song, both also from 91��ɫ, and Anthony Saunders, at New 91��ɫ’s Stern School of Business.

The paper has been accepted for coming publication in the Journal of Financial Economics and tracks the trading of 105 U.S. companies that borrowed money from hedge funds between January 2005 and July 2007—a period when regulators began demanding more information about short selling.

The academics found that the average company receiving a new loan from hedge funds saw a 74.8% spike in the volume of short sales during the five days preceding announcement of the new loan, as compared with the volume of short selling 60 days before the deal.

The study was funded by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada () standard research grant.

Read the full article in .

Republished courtesy of The Schulich School of Business' .

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