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Qem 19 hours ago

> The researchers took account of factors such as people’s age, sex and education, but cautioned that they could not rule out the potential influence of other factors that may have an impact on the brain, such as lifestyle and social engagement.

Perhaps it's just a correlation. Number of spoken linguages may correlate with income, frequent travel, sociability, or other factors that improve or filtre for health, brain health included.

HugoTea 17 hours ago | parent [-]

Conversely, I would not be shocked to see the vast majority of multi-linguals to be low-income immigrants.

Rendello 15 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Perhaps there's a U-curve. When I worked in a hotel in a metropolitan city, almost all workers there were multilingual. People from lower-income countries tended to do the unskilled work, whereas people with higher education tended to work at the front desk and in office roles, both having a mix of temporary and permanent residents.

It makes sense to me that the great in-between has less incentive to learn another language, if they're in a monolingual milieu. They don't have the economic push to find better opportunities elsewhere nor the means (or at least the idea) to travel and explore.

clickety_clack 15 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Depends on the population they drew the study sample from.