Why being bilingual really does seem to delay dementia

Parlez-vous français? Learning another language may stave off Alzheimer’s and other types of dementia – and it’s never too late to start.

Bilingualism was first linked with the deferral of dementia in 2007, when Ellen Bialystok at York University in Toronto and her colleagues examined the records of people who had been referred to a memory clinic and diagnosed with dementia. Of the 184 people in their analysis, symptoms appeared four years later in those who were bilingual than in their monolingual peers.…