My gut reaction: &quot;metric used to measure stroke recovery favors bilinguals&quot;<p>The article mentions cognitive tasks that are likely to benefit on some level from &quot;thinking in language&quot;. Duo clearly unrelated tasks like motor control also correlate? Is this really about brain activity keeping the system &quot;fresh&quot; and more capable of repair, or is it maybe just a simple matter of someone with &quot;more words&quot; pre-stroke having &quot;more words&quot; post-stroke?<p>My wildly uneducated guess, illustrated with computer analogies: when the brain has to cope with multiple languages, &quot;language thinking&quot; overflows from dedicated to general purpose &quot;hardware&quot; and due to some evolutionary dice roll, the dedicated stuff tends to get taken out first in a stroke.