Slang Is Beneficial for the Brain Says Study

It's impossible not to know some type of slang these days with new words entering the lexicon every day (See: "respeck") and pushing out words that used to mean something (See: R.I.P. "squad goals"). A study on language—just as surprising as the study that said people who curse more are articulate—has found that knowing slang improves memory.

Bro Biblereports the study was conducted by researchers at the University of Cambridge, the University of Cyprus, and the Cyprus University of Technology. Their findings on bi-dialectalism, meaning being able to speak two dialects, were published in the journal Cognition.

Citing the Daily Mail, Bro Biblereports the researchers compared the performances of: 64 bi-dialectal children, 47 multilingual children (speakers of several languages), and 25 monolingual children (speakers of one language). The children's ages aren't mentioned.

The children's intelligence, language proficiency, and socio-economic status were taken into account when comparing the performances of the three groups of children reports the Daily Mail.

Both multilingual and bi-dialectal children performed better in tests about "memory, attention, and cognitive flexibility" than monolingual children writes the Daily Mail.

"What is exciting and encouraging about our findings is that we were able to replicate the advantages of bilingualism in children who speak two varieties of the same language," said Dr. Antoniou, from Cambridge's Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics reports the Daily Mail.

Dr. Antoniou said whether or not the languages or dialects someone knew were similar to each other didn't really affect the test performances, and for that matter, the findings.

"Systematically switching between any two forms of language, even quite similar ones, seems to provide the mind with the extra stimulation that leads to higher cognitive performance" he said.