Voits, Toms and Rothman, Jason and Calabria, Marco and Robson, Holly and Aguirre, Naiara and Cattaneo, Gabriele and Costumero, Víctor and Hernández, Mireia and Juncadella Puig, Montserrat and Marín-Marín, Lidón and Suades, Anna and Costa, Albert and Pliatsikas, Christos (2023) Hippocampal adaptations in Mild Cognitive Impairment patients are modulated by bilingual language experiences. Bilingualism, 7 (3). pp. 263-273. ISSN 1366-7289
Full text not available from this repository.Abstract
Bilingualism has been shown to contribute to increased resilience against cognitive aging. One of the key brain structures linked to memory and dementia symptom onset, the hippocampus, has been observed to adapt in response to bilingual experience - at least in healthy individuals. However, in the context of neurodegenerative pathology, it is yet unclear what role previous bilingual experience might have in terms of sustaining integrity of this structure or related behavioral correlates. The present study adds to the limited cohort of research on the effects of bilingualism on neurocognitive outcomes in Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) using structural brain data. We investigate whether bilingual language experience (operationalized as language entropy) results in graded neurocognitive adaptations within a cohort of bilinguals diagnosed with MCI. Results reveal a non-linear effect of bilingual language entropy on hippocampal volume, although they do not predict episodic memory performance, nor age of MCI diagnosis.