Abstract
We make sense of objects and events around us 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, participants functioning in a German testing
context prefer to match events on the basis of motion completion to a greater
extent than participants in an English context. Second, when participants
suffer verbal interference in English, their categorization behavior is
congruent with that predicted for German and when we switch the language of
interference to 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.