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Habla some other language?

Bilingualism is a surprisingly fraught topic of research. For a long time, exciting results have been pouring out of the field, suggesting that bilingual children have a cognitive advantage over monolingual kids. But many of those results haven’t replicated, leaving a confusing picture—and it’s going to take a lot of research to unravel the knot.

There are also findings that suggest bilingualism could delay the onset of Alzheimer’s. A paper published in PNAS this week, led by Daniela Perani at the Vita-Salute San Raffaele University in Italy, reports underlying changes in the brain that seem to be connected to the delay. Again, the evidence for this is on the murky side, but it provides a great starting point for figuring out where to look for more robust evidence, says Jon Andoni Duñabeitia, a bilingualism researcher not involved with the paper.