The researchers found that 15 Germans fluent in English were just as goal-focused as any other native speaker when tested in German in their home country. This difference implies that German speakers are more likely to focus on possible outcomes of people's actions, but English speakers pay more attention to the action itself.īilingual speakers, meanwhile, seemed to switch between these perspectives based on the language most active in their minds. German speakers matched ambiguous scenes with goal-oriented scenes about 40% of the time on average, compared with 25% among English speakers. In each set of three videos, the researchers asked subjects to decide whether a scene with an ambiguous goal (a woman walks down a road toward a parked car) was more similar to a clearly goal-oriented scene (a woman walks into a building) or a scene with no goal (a woman walks down a country lane).
Athanasopoulos and colleagues asked 15 native speakers of each language to watch a series of video clips that showed people walking, biking, running, or driving. This linguistic difference seems to influence how speakers of the two languages view events, according to the new study.
Looking at the same scene, for example, German speakers might say, "A man leaves the house and walks to the store," whereas an English speaker would just say, "A man is walking." As a result, German speakers tend to specify the beginnings, middles, and ends of events, but English speakers often leave out the endpoints and focus in on the action. English has a grammatical toolkit for situating actions in time: "I was sailing to Bermuda and I saw Elvis" is different from "I sailed to Bermuda and I saw Elvis." German doesn't have this feature. Rather than ask whether speakers of different languages have different minds, he says, "we ask, 'Can two different minds exist within one person?' "Īthanasopoulos and colleagues were interested in a particular difference in how English and German speakers treat events. By studying bilinguals, "we're taking that classic debate and turning it on its head," says psycholinguist Panos Athanasopoulos of Lancaster University in the United Kingdom. In the new study, researchers turned to people who speak multiple languages. Still, skeptics argue that such results are laboratory artifacts, or at best reflect cultural differences between speakers that are unrelated to language.
And Japanese speakers tend to group objects by material rather than shape, whereas Koreans focus on how tightly objects fit together. Russian speakers are faster to distinguish shades of blue than English speakers, for example.
The idea has seen a revival in recent decades, as a growing number of studies suggested that language can prompt speakers to pay attention to certain features of the world. The work also finds that bilinguals may get the best of both worldviews, as their thinking can be more flexible.Ĭognitive scientists have debated whether your native language shapes how you think since the 1940s. Speakers of the two languages put different emphasis on actions and their consequences, influencing the way they think about the world, according to a new study. How did she get away? Now you might want to switch to English. Where did the thief go? You might get a more accurate answer if you ask the question in German.