Bilingualism as a Contributor to Cognitive Reserve: What it Can do and What it Cannot do

Abstract

In the absence of effective pharmacological interventions for the prevention of dementia, attention has turned to lifestyle factors that contribute to cognitive reserve. Although cognitive reserve cannot prevent the occurrence of disease, the trajectory is different for high reserve and low reserve patients, giving more time for independent living to high reserve individuals. We argue that lifelong bilingual experience meets the criteria for an experience that confers cognitive reserve, although neural reserve, a related concept, is more difficult to validate. Bilingual patients show symptoms at a later stage of disease and decline more rapidly than comparable monolingual patients. These patterns are considered in terms of evidence from behavioural, imaging and epidemiological studies. Finally, the role of bilingualism in protecting against symptoms of some forms of dementia are discussed in the context of other protective factors and the limits of this reserve approach in dealing with the consequences of dementia.

Keywords: bilingualism; biomarkers; cognitive reserve; prospective studies; retrospective studies.

Figure 1.

Theoretical depiction of cognitive performance as a function of increasing neuropathology in high and low cognitive reserve individuals, with numbered predictions as outlined in the text (adapted from Stern, 2012).