Cognitive differences between healthy monolingual and bilingual anglophones on the English version of the Dépistage Cognitif de Québec : A new screening tool for atypical dementia.

This article focuses on comparing cognitive performance between healthy older monolingual and bilingual anglophones using the English version of the Dépistage Cognitif de Québec (DCQ), a cognitive screening test designed to better detect atypical dementias. In a sample of 59 cognitively healthy Canadians aged 50 and over, bilingual participants (English-French) showed a significant advantage over monolinguals on the DCQ’s Language Index, contributing to higher overall DCQ scores, although the overall score difference did not remain significant after correction for multiple comparisons. No significant differences were found between groups on the Memory, Visuospatial, Executive, or Behavioural indexes. The study underscores the importance of accounting for linguistic diversity and bilingualism when interpreting cognitive screening results in clinical settings, as bilingualism may confer specific advantages on language-related cognitive tasks.