Bilingual Brains Are More Healthy

Old habits die hard. Such is the case with the old assumption, still in currency among many Armenian parents (even educated ones), that learning Armenian does not have benefits. For those who continue to tout the "benefits" of being monolingual (e.g. English-speaking), the Canadian neuroscientist Ellen Bialystok has recently made some startling findings: looking at Alzheimer's patients, she found that people who speak two or more languages cope significantly better with the disease. An interview by Kilian Fox in "The Guardian" (London) on June 12, 2011 gives more clues about this intriguing issue.