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[personal profile] ysabetwordsmith
.. include delaying Alzheimer's disease, and probably similar forms of cognitive decline.  This effect far outstrips the latest drug approved for that purpose.

1) Given a choice between a free treatment that requires a lot of work, and an expensive drug, I suspect that people who can obtain the drug will prefer it.  But the free option remains available to everyone.

2) Since proficiency is what matters, a great improvement to public health could be made by teaching all children a second language from birth or at least preschool, when it is possible to learn with native fluency.  I doubt that America has any interest in doing so.  But any parent could arrange it for their own kids, especially if there is a history of cognitive illness in the family.

Re: Options

Date: 2023-02-23 02:34 am (UTC)
From: [personal profile] see_also_friend
>>Yes. The protection comes from multiplying connections. Your brain doesn't care if you're speaking German or Sindarin, it only cares that you're demanding a lot of cross-referencing.<<

Variables:

I wonder if learning languages of different modality would work, i.e. if you grew up with spoken language would learning a sign language offer more of a buffer than learning a second spoken language? Would having a spoken and signed and tactile language be better than just two?

Do you need to be able to speak [produce linguistic output of] the language to gain benefits? Blissymbols has no spoken form, Rikchik is not speakable by humanoids, and some disabled folks might be able to receive a language without being able to speak it (selective mutism, for example).
https://www.blissymbolics.org/
https://www.omniglot.com/conscripts/rikchik.htm

[EDIT: Does having a language community affect anything? (It is harder to find a chat buddy for, say Rohingya or Laadan than for Russian or Spanish).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rohingya_language#:~:text=Rohingya%2C%20also%20known%20as%20Ru%C3%A1ingga%2C%20is%20a%20language,languages%20have%20a%20high%20degree%20of%20mutual%20intelligibility.
... END EDIT]
Edited Date: 2023-02-23 02:38 am (UTC)

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