As a research group, BALAB members have been deeply fascinated by the interplay between using multiple languages, on the one hand, and cognitive and mental health on the other since our foundation in 2018. As a group, we act on the increased relevance of this research line and conceptualize language studies that tackle societal challenges related to healthy aging. Our group’s work capitalizes on the fact that nothing is so intricately interwoven with personhood, identity and the self as language. Among other things, in our work we have found that growing old in an environmental where the dominant language is not your own may negatively impact psychosocial and cognitive health; that lifelong multilingualism can lead to better cognitive and mental health in older adulthood; and that learning a new language later in life help older adults battling memory and mental health problems. We interpret aging in the broadest sense possible: although we focus on the older adult lifespan, we involve the entire lifespan as part of our aging perspectives. One of our current research lines focuses on the interplay between genetic and familial predispositions of developing age-associated memory disorders and current cognitive performance, as modulated by multilingual experiences in middle adulthood. Most recently, our group has started to investigate language barriers that prevent equitable care for Persons Living with Dementia (PWD) with a migrant background as well as the question whether exposure to home languages can meaningfully improve the psychosocial well-being among migrant PWD. BALAB group members strongly feel that major societal challenges like healthy aging can only be solved by multidisciplinary teams; we closely collaborate with researchers from medical sciences, researchers from the Hanze University of Applied Sciences and societal partners, such as Pharos, Alzheimer Nederland and Vilans. For individual BALAB projects of individual BALAB members, please refer to the 'people' tab on our website.
