http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2...110310.php

"CAMBRIDGE, Mass., Nov. 3, 2010 -- The language we speak may influence not only our thoughts, but our implicit preferences as well. That's the finding of a study by psychologists at Harvard University, who found that bilingual individuals' opinions of different ethnic groups were affected by the language in which they took a test examining their biases and predilections.

The paper appears in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.

"Charlemagne is reputed to have said that to speak another language is to possess another soul," says co-author Oludamini Ogunnaike, a graduate student at Harvard. "This study suggests that language is much more than a medium for expressing thoughts and feelings. Our work hints that language creates and shapes our thoughts and feelings as well.""

Original: The language of implicit preferences

Abstract: Are attitudes affected by the language in which they are expressed? In particular, do individual preferences shift to accord with the cultural values embedded in a given language? To examine these questions, two experiments tested bilingual participants, administering the same test of implicit attitudes in two languages. In both studies, participants manifested attitudes that favored social categories associated with the test language, e.g. more pro-Moroccan attitudes when tested in Arabic as compared with French (Study 1) and more pro-Spanish attitudes when tested in Spanish as compared with English (Study 2). The effects of language on elicited preference were large (mean d > .7), providing evidence that preferences are not merely transmitted through language but also shaped by it.

Care to explain the method of testing biases. I don't have 31 bucks to look at the paper ATM.

And, as usual. Waahhhh o.0

"It's like asking your friend if he likes ice cream in English, and then turning around and asking him again in French and getting a different answer."

I thought this was a given. There is no such thing as perfect translation. Ice cream and アイスクリーム are actually 2 different things. They have slightly different meanings and connotations. For example some Japanese people call sorbet アイスクリーム while people in the states seem to differentiate them more strictly. And I remember an episode of Friends where Ross said he didn't like ice cream and everybody just got flipped out and was like "WHAT? WHY???", then his friend Joey went "I told you not to tell people that" with a knowing face. I English, it's something so good it's almost unbelievable that someone doesn't like it. Or at least there is a consensus to the extent one of the most popular TV shows depicted it as such. In Japanese though, a 30 year old man eating ice cream can sometimes be seen as somewhat comical. Given that, my answers to "Do you like ice cream?" and "アイスクリーム好き？" can well be different.

masaman Wrote:"It's like asking your friend if he likes ice cream in English, and then turning around and asking him again in French and getting a different answer."

I thought this was a given. There is no such thing as perfect translation. Ice cream and アイスクリーム are actually 2 different things. They have slightly different meanings and connotations. For example some Japanese people call sorbet アイスクリーム while people in the states seem to differentiate them more strictly. And I remember an episode of Friends where Ross said he didn't like ice cream and everybody just got flipped out and was like "WHAT? WHY???", then his friend Joey went "I told you not to tell people that" with a knowing face. I English, it's something so good it's almost unbelievable that someone doesn't like it. Or at least there is a consensus to the extent one of the most popular TV shows depicted it as such. In Japanese though, a 30 year old man eating ice cream can sometimes be seen as somewhat comical. Given that, my answers to "Do you like ice cream?" and "アイスクリーム好き？" can well be different.

This reminds me of a woman (either American or British, I forget) I saw vlogging on YouTube who said that after she became an adult and moved out of her parents' house she realised that she actually disliked ice cream. Before that she had thought she liked it because in her parents house ice cream was the ultimate treat that had to be deserved. It lost all of its charm as soon as she was in a position to get as much of it as she wanted.

Anyway, closer to the topic, in one of my school classes I was told of a study carried out some time shortly after WWII, when a group of 一世 Japanese-American women were given a political questionnaire. First they took its Japanese version, and then they took the same questionnaire translated into English (or maybe the other way round). Their answers on the Japanese version turned out to be more conservative than on the English one. I wish I had more details about that study, because this is a very interesting topic. As a person with strong political opinions I would like to know if my results would differ if I took such a test in English and Russian (or Japanese, when I get fluent enough to express political opinions). The only difference I notice is that I come off as a bit more cynical in Russian, even though sarcasm and self-deprecation seem to come out more naturally in English.

Probably they designed the experiment carefully in such a way that the tests minimized the lost-in-translation effect so that participants would give their "honest" answers, if that makes sense. But I kind of think it's researchers' side that difference in translation has the most impact on unless they're also multilinguals with native proficiency in the languages used in experiments.

Obviously, ice cream and アイスクリーム are different, so what those words evoke in a native bilingual's mind would also be different. If you think apples and りんご are the same, then your mental image for the Japanese word isn't the same way as that of your average Japanese person. This kind of difference can make speakers of the two languages respond to the allegedly equivalent questions the way monolingual people might think different or even opposite.

If you asked me, "Do you eat fruit for lunch?", I'd say yes because I do sometimes eat apples, bananas, etc. for lunch. But if you asked, "昼食に果物を食べますか？", then I'd hesitate a bit and then say yes. Now if you didn't give no time to think like in the experiment nest0r quoted, my response must be "No." Of course, I'm definitely not equally proficient in English and Japanese. But this kind of pair of "equivalent" questions already makes me respond in a way others might think I changed my opinion or even lied, which I didn't. If my English were as good as my Japanese and didn't learned English as an adult learner, I might fail to understand why this happens and think I have two personalities.

If you don't understand what I'm talking about here, consider a bilingual person who has spent half of his life in country A in the Southern Hemisphere and the other half in country B in the Northern Hemisphere. Different languages are spoken in the two countries, and he speaks both languages natively. He likes hot summer and doesn't like cold weather. Now, as in the experiment done in the research, you show him the two words for "August" for only milliseconds in the two languages spoken in countries A and B and see if he pushes the button for "good" or "bad." Do you think he would push the same button regardless of the language?

"August" is an example to exaggerate the lost-in-translation effect. Everyone would agree that if language doesn't shape his thought, probably he would pick different buttons unless, say, he had a terrible experience in an August in the Northern Hemisphere in the past. But even the closest words in two languages must have a subtle difference in connotations, implications, etc., resulting in slightly different mental images in one same bilingual person's mind.

Also, this brings up another challenge: how do you know what kind of association/connotation/impression he has for each word in each language? It'd be nearly impossible for scientists to test whether language affects a person's thought in the kind of experiment the scientists did, I think.

This kind of difference between languages exists not only in words, but also in grammar in a less noticeable way. And all subtle differences add up when you construct an "equivalent" sentence, which may elicit a response that looks opposite to another person's eye. I don't think it's possible to form questions in two very different languages spoken in different cultures in a way you can directly see if a person changes opinions depending on language. That's too naive a view, I guess.

Also, I don't understand how you can be sure a person changes his personality depending on language when exactly the same action can be perceived differently. If you're a polite person and are in a situation where you're to speak language A, you probably behave the way people from the country where language A is spoken would think polite. The same action might be though of as rude in a region where another language B is mainly spoken. And if you're a bilingual person in languages A and B, a monolingual person who only speaks language B might be confused because, to him, you look like you always switch personalities depending on the language you're speaking in. He might even think language must alter your personality when you are just acting the way you are.

So this is IAT, I guess.
https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/de...atest.html

It's very interesting, and I had fun taking the test, at least for a couple of times. According to this, I like the young much more than the old and think men are slightly more related to science than women are, and I agree with that.

Like the ice cream example (I'm not meaning IceCream!) And Magamo's August example, I think it's possible I would be more likely to say I liked Japanese things more when asked in Japanese. Sea cucumber doesn't sound tasty (yuck!) but ナマコ does (ナマコの酢の物とか旨いよねー). I know it doesn't exactly work that way but the connotation is there. And then, am I likely to prefer an American dish at a dinner when I'm thinking in English, and a Japanese dish when I am thinking in Japanese? mmm. I don't know but probably not. When I want to eat Sushi I want to eat 寿司, and when I want to eat ステーキ I want to eat steak. I think...

And IceCream, you might want to change your name to ColdBeer = 冷たいビール. That way, you'll get more love, especially from guys. Though, they all might have beer bellies