She carries the rank of Distinguished Research Professor at York University in Toronto, Ontario where she is director of the Lifespan Cognition and Development Lab.
[1] Much of Bialystok's current research concentrates on bilingualism from childhood through older adulthood and aging, and its effects on cognitive processes over the lifespan.
Two groups of children who were either monolingual or bilingual completed a complex classification task that required the use of either one or multiple components of executive control functions.
However, it is thought that because bilinguals must constantly shift between two languages, selecting the correct words from one while ignoring competing information from the other, that they have more practice in simultaneously using multiple components of executive functioning.
[4] Because bilinguals go through this process on a daily basis throughout their lifespan, they therefore gain an advantage over monolingual individuals who do not recruit this same simultaneous function as often.
Bialystok, Hermanto, and Moreno examined a group of children in grades 2 and 5 who were placed in an intensive French immersion program within the context of an English-speaking community.
Bialystok, Luk, Craik, Grady, and Anderson used fMRI technology to examine the active brain regions of both monolingual and bilingual young adults during tasks representing either interference suppression, by manually pressing a correct response key, or response inhibition, where participants had to intentionally inhibit a specific eye movement.
[7] In the response inhibition condition, both the monolinguals and bilinguals activated the same neural network and performed the task in the same amount of time.
Further analysis showed that bilinguals did, in fact, have inferior language knowledge as compared to monolinguals, yet similar working memory abilities.
[9] The natural process of aging has a deteriorating effect on the brain, and commonly leads to detrimental conditions such as dementia or more specifically, Alzheimer's disease.
As people grow older, it has been shown that white matter integrity in the brain generally decreases as the natural process of aging takes its course, resulting in a decline of cognitive functioning and control.
[10] Bialystok, Luk, Craik, and Grady, using diffusion tensor imaging (DTI), measured the amount of white matter integrity in both monolingual and bilingual older adults.
A possible explanation holds that continued experience in the maintenance and management of two competing languages enhances and strengthens certain structural pathways in the brain, resulting in a widespread network of white matter connectivity, which then helps protect against natural cognitive decline.
Results supported this notion and found that the bilingual patients with AD did, in fact, show a greater level of brain atrophy in relevant areas.
[12] These results support the hypothesis maintaining that bilingualism works as a contributor to cognitive reserve and acts as a modifier to behavioral expression that underlies brain atrophy associated with Alzheimer's disease.
Bialystok, Craik, and Freedman collected data from bilingual and monolingual patients diagnosed with probable Alzheimer's disease regarding, most importantly, age of onset of cognitive impairment and language history and abilities.