Overview
- Published in Nature Aging, the analysis draws on national survey data from 27 European countries using AI-derived biobehavioral age gaps.
- People in contexts where at least one additional language is commonly spoken were 2.17 times less likely to show accelerated aging, while monolinguals were more than twice as likely to exhibit early aging patterns.
- The association held in both cross-sectional and longitudinal analyses after adjusting for linguistic, physical, social, and sociopolitical factors.
- Benefits scaled with the number of languages spoken, with researchers reporting a cumulative protective effect.
- The biobehavioral aging model showed moderate performance (R2 = 0.24, r = 0.49, RMSE ≈ 8.61), and the authors urged policy support for language learning as a low-cost brain-health strategy.