By now, we’ve heard much about multilingualism’s mass appeal for both mind and market value alike (apologies for sounding too gauche, but isn’t that what the curriculum vitae is all about?). It’s no surprise to see that speaking more than one language may have significant benefits on our cognition as we age (Amoruso et al., 2025; Bialystok, 2021). The types of languages themselves, however, may also have an impact on our cognition.
A study of language and cognition in older adults using a national survey
Petrosyan et al. (2025) studied this impact with a sample of 4088 older Indian adults ages 60 or over, which included around half without formal schooling (54%). This sample was procured from the Longitudinal Aging Study in India – Diagnostic Assessment of Dementia, which is a subset of a national survey representing 40 different languages and dialects. Two main findings from this study were:
- Multilingualism was associated with better cognitive function across all studied domains among those with education; the relatedness between languages was not a factor here
- Among those without education, however, multilingual adults who spoke related languages had better executive function compared to monolinguals
In this study, we see that language diversity and education may both affect cognitive functioning among older adults. What does this mean for multilingual benefits? It may mean relatedness of languages spoken by the multilingual speaker may affect how the brain organizes, retrieves, and processes information. Through the study’s analysis, teasing apart the differences between those with and without education revealed a sort of cost-benefit model of speaking related vs unrelated languages; based on their finding, speaking unrelated languages did not confer better executive function for those in the non-education group. The authors point out that those in the non-education group may have reduced resource access and may use related languages more often than unrelated ones since related languages are present in similar geographical areas (Petrosyan et al., 2025). From this we can see that:
- Education levels may also indicate resource availability (Petrosyan et al., 2025), not only skill/knowledge acquisition levels
- Related languages may be found in related geographical areas (i.e., languages spoken become more different as geographic distances increase; Huisman et al., 2019)
- More use of languages (as may have been the case in related languages) may confer clearer cognitive benefits than less-used languages
So, is multilingualism helpful or… ?
This brings us to question of what multilingualism is. Is multilingualism defined simply by the languages known or also by its language diversity, or even its proficiency? Defining multilingualism does not appear consistent among multilingual studies, making it prudent to parse out its variations to understand its truer effects on our thinking. Multilingualism may indeed keep our cognitive control with age, but its caress may come with caveats.
References
Amoruso, L., Hernandez, H., Santamaria-Garcia, H., Moguilner, S., Legaz, A., Prado, P., Cuadros, J., Gonzalez, L., Gonzalez-Gomez, R., Migeot, J., Coronel-Oliveros, C., Cruzat, J., Carreiras, M., Medel, V., Maito, M. A., Duran-Aniotz, C., Tagliazucchi, E., Baez, S., García, A. M., & Ibanez, A. (2025). Multilingualism protects against accelerated aging in cross-sectional and longitudinal analyses of 27 European countries. Nature aging, 5(11), 2340–2354. https://doi.org/10.1038/s43587-025-01000-2
Bialystok, E. (2021). Cognitive Implications of Bilingualism. Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190236557.013.763
Huisman, J. L. A., Majid, A., & van Hout, R. (2019). The geographical configuration of a language area influences linguistic diversity. PloS one, 14(6), e0217363. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0217363
Petrosyan, S., Strangmann, I. M., Nichols, E., Meijer, E., Briceño, E. M., Narayanan, S., Lee, J., & Arce Rentería, M. (2025). The association of multilingualism with diverse language families and cognition among adults with and without education in India. Neuropsychology, 39(3), 223–234. https://doi.org/10.1037/neu0000988
