Learning a Language May Stave Off Dementia, but Are Apps the Way to Go?

Learning a new language has been shown to delay the onset of dementia. But can an interactive language app do the trick?

Duolingo, Babbel and others have been growing in popularity among older adults looking to pick up languages for travel as well as for sharpening their brains. Numerous studies suggest bilingual people develop dementia later than monolingual people do.

You don’t have to achieve fluency to benefit, research shows. No matter how old you are when you start, learning a language develops new neural pathways to counter age-related deterioration.

“The critical thing is to gain a lot of practice and immerse yourself in it as much as possible,” says John Grundy, an assistant professor of psychology at Iowa State University.

In 2020 Grundy and colleagues published an analysis of the research that’s been done on bilingualism and cognitive decline. Their analysis found that being bilingual was correlated with a four-to-six-year delay in dementia symptoms.

Less lonely and isolated

Teens and young adults are the biggest users of language-learning apps, but older adults tend to use them more frequently and to stick with them longer. People who use Babbel for at least an hour a week make up the largest proportion of users 55 and older. 

Nearly 30% of Duolingo users ages 60 and older have maintained yearlong streaks on the app, with many saying they use it for brain training.

The appeal of these apps is clear, especially for older people: You can learn from home, at little or no cost. You can progress steadily even if you don’t have nearby friends or family to practice with. And you don’t have to find an in-person class or buy a plane ticket to a far-off land.

“Learning on an app is not as good as moving to France,” Grundy says, “but any amount of language-learning you do helps.”

Lenore Rosenbluth, a 77-year-old in Roxbury, N.J., uses Duolingo multiple times a day. For Rosenbluth, who formerly taught college-level languages, it’s more than just a way to burnish her French, Spanish and Japanese skills. She was diagnosed three years ago with multiple system atrophy, a rare degenerative neurological disorder that affects her speech and mobility.

She says practicing languages helps her feel less lonely and isolated. (Social isolation is a major cause of cognitive decline.) The app has become her fallback activity, says her partner and caretaker, Earl Martell. “When there are voids, they’re filled with Duolingo,” he says.

Jed Meltzer,

Learning a language on the app was as effective at improving executive functioning as using the brain-training app, the study found. Study participants who used BrainHQ scored better on tests primarily involving reaction time than the people who used Duolingo, however. Duolingo helped fund the study but wasn’t involved in designing it or reviewing the results, the company says.

Not the be-all and end-all, but worth a try

Language-app developers are careful not to make claims about their products delaying dementia, after what happened to the maker of brain-training app Lumosity.

In 2016, the Federal Trade Commission fined its developer, Lumos Labs, for making what it called unsubstantiated claims that its games could delay age-related cognitive decline. The company settled with the FTC and changed its advertising, though it didn’t admit to or deny the allegations.

Some studies have cautioned against viewing bilingualism as insurance against dementia. One analysis of studies that follow people over time didn’t find that bilingualism protects against cognitive decline. The researchers, from University College London, did find benefits when reviewing studies involving information collected about subjects’ pasts, but they said it’s hard to prove that language-learning was a cause.

Grundy, from Iowa State, says his review controlled for demographic variables and other influences that can affect cognitive decline. He and colleagues are now completing a review of research on how language-learning affects white matter, the brain’s information highway. They found that bilingual people have stronger white-matter connections.

Still, physical exercise is the best thing to do to improve brain health, Meltzer says. Having friends, working at a mentally-challenging job and treating hearing loss also help cognition. 

Whether learning a foreign language is as helpful is uncertain, but researchers agree there’s no downside to learning another language. 

The “use it or lose it” adage applies just as much to brain fitness as it does to physical fitness, doctors say.

Meltzer says apps aren’t the be-all and end-all of language learning, but says: “If you want to get good at speaking Spanish, you have to have conversations with people in Spanish. But the apps are well suited to our daily lives, when we’re on our phones all the time.”

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Write to Julie Jargon at [email protected]