Rights statement: The final, definitive version of this article has been published in the Journal, Psychological Science, 26 (4), 2015, © SAGE Publications Ltd, 2015 by SAGE Publications Ltd at the Psychological Science page: http://pss.sagepub.com/ on SAGE Journals Online: http://online.sagepub.com/
Accepted author manuscript, 388 KB, PDF document
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
}
TY - JOUR
T1 - Two languages, two minds
T2 - flexible cognitive processing driven by language of operation
AU - Athanasopoulos, Panos
AU - Bylund, Emanuel
AU - Montero-Melis, Guillermo
AU - Damjanovic, Ljubica
AU - Schartner, Alina
AU - Kibbe, Alexandra
AU - Riches, Nick
AU - Thierry, Guillaume
N1 - The final, definitive version of this article has been published in the Journal, Psychological Science, 26 (4), 2015, © SAGE Publications Ltd, 2015 by SAGE Publications Ltd at the Psychological Science page: http://pss.sagepub.com/ on SAGE Journals Online: http://online.sagepub.com/
PY - 2015/4
Y1 - 2015/4
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
KW - bilingualism
KW - cognition(s)
KW - cognitive processes
KW - language
KW - psycholinguistics
U2 - 10.1177/0956797614567509
DO - 10.1177/0956797614567509
M3 - Journal article
VL - 26
SP - 518
EP - 526
JO - Psychological Science
JF - Psychological Science
SN - 0956-7976
IS - 4
ER -