similar to stimulating mental activity. To test whether or not bilingualism contributes to cognitive reserve, Bialystok et al. (2012) looked at hospital records among monolingual and bilingual adults who have dementia. The researchers found that elderly bilingual adults were diagnosed with dementia about three to four years later than elderly monolingual adults. The results have been replicated and validated, with outside factors being controlled. In fact, outside factors such as socioeconomic status and cultural differences always helped monolinguals, making the argument the bilingualism contributes to cognitive reserve even stronger (Bialystok et al., 2012). That finding enhances the fact that bilinguals are at an advantage because of their ability to speak two languages, not because of outside factors. A probable explanation for this phenomenon is that knowledge of multiple languages keeps the brain alert and therefore more mentally aware for a longer period of time. Emotion and behavior A study conducted with children in their early school years suggested that there are emotional and behavioural benefits to being bilingual. In the same study, the findings show that monolingual children, in particular non-English monolingual children, display more poor behavioural and emotional outcomes in their school years. The non-English monolingual children had the highest level of externalizing and internalizing behavioral problems by fifth grade (around 10–11 years of age), even though the children were all measured to have similar levels of internalizing and externalizing behavioral problems at the start. In contrast, the fluent bilingual and non-English dominant bilingual children were found to have the lowest level of these behavioural problems. The authors suggest that monolingualism seems to be a risk factor. However, if there is a supportive school environment with teachers who are experienced in ESL (English as a Second Language), children seem to have better emotional constitution. Memory performance In a study conducted at the University of Florida, which compared Native-English bilinguals to English monolinguals, although there was no difference in accuracy between the two groups, there was a slower response rate from bilinguals on tasks that involve latency of recognition of a list of abstract words and lexical decision tasks, but not in any of the other tasks used in their study. The researchers noted that the tasks where bilinguals had a significant disadvantage were those which were data-driven (subjects were given verbal input and asked to make decisions about it), as opposed to conceptually driven (subjects were asked to produce