Learning a 2nd language after age 10 'boosts brain power'

Abundant research has shown that learning a second language can boost brain power, but a new study suggests that the effects extend to those who begin in middle childhood.

It shows that people who began learning English at age 10 and were immersed in the language, meaning they heard and used it in daily life, showed improvements in the structure of the brain's white matter compared with people who grew up speaking only English and did not learn a second language.

These "higher levels of structural integrity" were in areas responsible for language learning and semantic processing, which occurs when the meaning of a word is encoded and related to similar words with similar meaning.