Journal
NEUROPSYCHOLOGIA
Volume 49, Issue 14, Pages 3826-3830Publisher
PERGAMON-ELSEVIER SCIENCE LTD
DOI: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2011.09.041
Keywords
Bilingualism; Dementia onset; Hispanic; Education
Funding
- NIDCD [R01 DC011492]
- NIA [P50 AG05131]
- NICHD [R01 HD050287]
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The current study investigated the relationship between bilingual language proficiency and onset of probable Alzheimer's disease (AD) in 44 Spanish-English bilinguals at the UCSD Alzheimer's Disease Research Center. Degree of bilingualism along a continuum was measured using Boston Naming Test (BNT) scores in each language. Higher degrees of bilingualism were associated with increasingly later age-of-diagnosis (and age of onset of symptoms), but this effect was driven by participants with low education level (a significant interaction between years of education and bilingualism) most of whom (73%) were also Spanish-dominant. Additionally, only objective measures (i.e., BNT scores), not self-reported degree of bilingualism, predicted age-of-diagnosis even though objective and self-reported measures were significantly correlated. These findings establish a specific connection between knowledge of two languages and delay of AD onset, and demonstrate that bilingual effects can be obscured by interactions between education and bilingualism, and by failure to obtain objective measures of bilingualism. More generally, these data support analogies between the effects of bilingualism and cognitive reserve and suggest an upper limit on the extent to which reserve can function to delay dementia. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
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