Two languages, two minds: flexible cognitive processing driven by language of operation.
People make sense of objects and events around them by classifying them into identifiable categories. The extent to which language affects this process has been the focus of a long-standing debate: Do different languages cause their speakers to behave differently? Here, we show that fluent German-English bilinguals categorize motion events according to the grammatical constraints of the language in which they operate. First, as predicted from cross-linguistic differences in motion encoding, bilingual participants functioning in a German testing context prefer to match events on the basis of motion completion to a greater extent than do bilingual participants in an English context. Second, when bilingual participants experience verbal interference in English, their categorization behavior is congruent with that predicted for German; when bilingual participants experience verbal interference in German, their categorization becomes congruent with that predicted for English. These findings show that language effects on cognition are context-bound and transient, revealing unprecedented levels of malleability in human cognition.
Department of Linguistics and English Language, Lancaster University p.athanasopoulos@lancaster.ac.uk.
Panos
P
Athanasopoulos
Centre for Research on Bilingualism, Stockholm University.
Emanuel
E
Bylund
Centre for Research on Bilingualism, Stockholm University.
Guillermo
G
Montero-Melis
Department of Psychology, University of Chester.
Ljubica
L
Damjanovic
School of Education, Communication, and Language Sciences, Newcastle University.
Alina
A
Schartner
Institute of Psychology, Otto von Guericke University.
Alexandra
A
Kibbe
Department of Speech & Language Pathology, Newcastle University.
Nick
N
Riches
School of Psychology, Bangor University.
Guillaume
G
Thierry
D000328:Adult; D003071:Cognition / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D019303:Multilingualism; D011578:Psycholinguistics; D014705:Verbal Behavior / Q000502:physiology; D055815:Young Adult
bilingualism; cognition(s); cognitive processes; language; psycholinguistics