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Athanasopoulos, P, Bylund, E, Montero-Melis, G, Damjanovic, L, Schartner, A, Kibbe, A, Riches, N and Thierry, G (2015) Two languages, two minds: flexible cognitive processing driven by language of operation. Psychological Science, 26 (4). ISSN 0956-7976
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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.
| Item Type: | Article |
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| Uncontrolled Keywords: | 1701 Psychology, 1702 Cognitive Science |
| Subjects: | B Philosophy. Psychology. Religion > BF Psychology |
| Divisions: | Psychology (from Sep 2019) |
| Publisher: | SAGE Publications |
| Related URLs: | |
| Date Deposited: | 23 Jan 2020 12:00 |
| Last Modified: | 04 Sep 2021 11:49 |
| DOI or ID number: | 10.1177/0956797614567509 |
| URI: | https://researchonline.ljmu.ac.uk/id/eprint/5875 |
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