Investigating the effect of multilingualism on Alzheimer's patients' cognitive function

The aim of this research was to investigate the effect of multilingualism on Alzheimer's patients' cognitive function.

The present research is practical considering goals, retrospective considering time and belongs to casual-comparative studies considering data collection method; which have been collected with field research approach. The statistical population consisted of Alzheimer's patients (monolingual, bilingual) who were living in nursing homes or centers working with keeping of Alzheimer's patients in Shiraz (2018), among them a sample of 90 people were selected including 60 Alzheimer's patients (monolingual, bilingual) and 30 normal people as the control group. The participants' age ranged from 45 to 75 years. Sampling was based on available random. Measuring instruments of the research were psychological status questionnaire, the MMSE test and the Working Memory Digit Backward Test which were spread among the sample population.

In order to analyze the data, based on the research questions and hypotheses, descriptive statistics analyses were used such as mean and min/max standard deviation. Also, in inferential level, single-variable variance test was used. Results of the data analyses showed that there is a significant difference between cognitive function and its components in three groups of the study. Also, the findings indicated that there is a significant difference between all groups regarding working memory.

Generally, the mean for the normal people is higher than the mean for the bilingual Alzheimer's patients, and the mean for the bilingual Alzheimer's patients is higher than the mean for the monolingual Alzheimer's patients. Mental activities have positive effect on Alzheimer's disease. Including, learning second language can reduce Alzheimer's disease in bilingual or multilingual people