Learning multiple languages may slow brain aging: Study

By Seyit Kurt

ISTANBUL (AA) - People who speak more than one language may experience slower brain aging and reduced cognitive decline, according to a large-scale study published in Nature Aging on Monday.

"Just one additional language reduces the risk of accelerated aging, but when you speak two or three, this effect was larger,” said Agustin Ibanez, a neuroscientist at Adolfo Ibanez University in Chile and co-author of the study. He also stressed that the research aimed to clarify long-debated questions about the relationship between multilingualism and aging.

The study, conducted by an international team of neuroscientists and psychologists, examined data from over 86,000 healthy adults aged between 51 and 90 across 27 European countries.

Researchers found that individuals who spoke two or more languages were significantly less likely to show signs of accelerated biological aging than those who spoke only one language.

According to the findings, multilingual participants were half as likely to have a high "biobehavioral age gap"—a measure comparing biological and chronological aging—compared to monolingual individuals. The gap was further reduced among those who spoke three or more languages.

Experts say the study’s scale and methodology provide stronger evidence than earlier research, which often relied on smaller and less diverse samples.

“The effects of multilingualism on aging have always been controversial, but I don’t think there has been a study of this scale before, which seems to demonstrate them quite decisively,” said Christos Pliatsikas, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Reading in the United Kingdom.

Researchers plan to extend the study to populations outside Europe to determine whether the same effects hold across different cultural and socioeconomic contexts.