Two languages, two minds: flexible cognitive processing driven by language of operation.

Athanasopoulos, P; Bylund, E; Montero-Melis, G; Damjanovic, L; Schartner, A; Kibbe, A; Riches, N; Thierry, G

Two languages, two minds: flexible cognitive processing driven by language of operation.

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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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Publisher URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0956797614567509

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
Uncontrolled Keywords:	1701 Psychology, 1702 Cognitive Science
Subjects:	B Philosophy. Psychology. Religion > BF Psychology
Divisions:	Psychology (from Sep 2019)
Publisher:	SAGE Publications
Related URLs:	https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25749698
Date of acceptance:	17 December 2014
Date of first compliant Open Access:	23 January 2020
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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