The point is that the enhanced cognitive control that may accrue from speaking more than one language could help people better cope with the onset of dementia. Other studies looking at memory clinic patients diagnosed with dementia showed that multilingual patients were, on average, four years older than patients who spoke only one language when they first began experiencing memory problems. Continued Functioning This doesn’t necessarily mean that dementia affects the brains of multilingual speakers later in life. But it does imply that a lifetime’s experience of doing the mental work necessary to think and speak in more than one language helps multilingual speakers continue functioning for longer even as their brains began to deteriorate.