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  • Title: Two languages, two minds: flexible cognitive processing driven by language of operation.
    Author: Athanasopoulos P, Bylund E, Montero-Melis G, Damjanovic L, Schartner A, Kibbe A, Riches N, Thierry G.
    Journal: Psychol Sci; 2015 Apr; 26(4):518-26. PubMed ID: 25749698.
    Abstract:
    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.
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