LAUSR

With the continuation of the bilingual advantage debate, an outstanding question is whether bilingualism still carries any weight in dementia studies, and how it should be interpreted from here on. This opinion paper commences by justifying why the psycholinguistically-informed bilingual advantage debate, with its issues being more methodological in nature, should not impede the continuous neuroscientific efforts that explore the bilingualism-dementia link. In neuroscience, imaging techniques bring forth a different biological perspective, focusing more on the physical consequences of bilingualism in the brain rather than establishing a dichotomous argument over whether or not bilingualism is useful. Moving forward, what we currently know about the neurological mechanisms of bilingualism and dementia is still generic at present, and the lack of consideration of dementia’s heterogeneity could slow down research progress on the bilingualism-dementia link. To that end, this paper proposes a look into bilingualism and dementia subtypes, justifying the helpfulness of starting with specific areas of investigation: (i) why subtypes of dementia appear to be deferred by different lengths among bilinguals, (ii) how bilingual neural reserve interacts with the pathologies of dementia subtypes, and (iii) how bilingual neural reserve interacts with affected brain areas of dementia subtypes. These insights enable a more sophisticated understanding of bilingualism and its effects on the diverse mechanisms of memory loss and executive dysfunction, allowing us to understand how bilingualism compares with other types of mentally stimulating activities in old age.