Why do we see the world differently depending on the language in which we describe it? And what benefits does it give bilinguals? The results of an interesting psycholinguistic experiment.
Bilinguals are lucky. They have higher salaries, better career prospects, and even age-related changes in mental abilities catch up with them on average 5 years later. Over the past 15 years, science has been experiencing a real bilingual boom – the number of studies devoted to this topic is no longer countable. Most of them showed that bilingualism is directly related to intellectual flexibility: the constant switching between languages serves as gymnastics for the mind, protecting it from blindness in the same way that exercising in the morning keeps muscles toned and flexible – and the older the person, the stronger the effect, up to delayed onset of signs of dementia and Alzheimer’s disease.
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A recent study in which experimenters “switched” English-German bilinguals from one language to another found that the language of thought directly affects human behavior1. In the first series of experiments, the researchers showed a video clip to only German or English speakers. In the first video, the woman was walking towards the car; on the second, a man rode a bicycle towards a supermarket. In both cases, the participant in the experiment was asked to describe what he/she sees. German speakers have always described the video as “Woman walking towards the car” or “Man riding a bicycle towards the supermarket”, while Anglophones have said “Woman walking” or “Man riding a bicycle” without indicating the direction of travel. Scientists have associated this with the peculiarities of the grammars of the two languages: perhaps the fact is that in German the idea of uXNUMXbuXNUMXbthe direction of movement is more “embedded” in grammar, and in English the existence of continuous tense forms (the -ing form) allows you to focus on the process without specifying the goal.
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Then bilinguals were invited to participate in the experiment. If the experiment took place in Germany, the bilinguals behaved in exactly the same way as native German speakers, if in England, they responded in the English manner. Then the researchers decided to slightly improve the task. The bilinguals, when describing the video, had to simultaneously say aloud a random series of numbers in German or English. Such an additional exercise was aimed at blocking the language that was not currently used – and the answers of the informants perfectly reflected this: while a number of numbers were pronounced in German, the answers of the informants contained information not only about the action, but also about its direction; conversely, the English numerals turned off the mention of the purpose of the movement. Moreover, when the scientists asked the subjects to change the language in which they pronounced the numbers, their answers immediately changed – the direction specification appeared or disappeared in them.
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- Learn a foreign language… for yourself
This example shows another feature of bilingual thinking. It was previously shown that speaking a second language, we move away from ourselves: we distance ourselves from our own emotions, we become more reasonable. For example, when we hear insults addressed to us in a language other than our own, we perceive them more detachedly. Conversely, we take the expression of emotions in the first language more to heart. On the other hand, sometimes bilinguals choose the language of expression, guided by the extent to which it is customary to express this or that emotion in this language. Research has also shown that when we think about a problem in a second language, we make a more rational, cold, and beneficial decision, as we move away from the emotional evaluation that our native language imposes on him and which he is not even aware of.2. In a word, a second language is not only a help in communication, but also a great intellectual bonus.
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1 P. Athanasopoulos et al. «Two languages, two minds: flexible cognitive processing driven by language of operation» Psychological Science, April 2015 (26).
2 W. Harris. “Thinking in a foreign language helps economic decision-making”. Online publication April 25, 2012 at the University of Chicago website.