This may be the first time you hear about this made-up disorder but
it actually isn’t so far from the truth. Even the studies that were conducted almost half a century show that
the language you speak has more effects on you than you realize.
One of the very first experiments conducted on this topic dates back to 1964.
In the experiment
designed by linguist Ervin-Tripp who is an authority expert in psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic studies,
adults who are bilingual in English in French were showed series of pictures and were asked to create 3-minute stories.
In the end participants emphasized drastically different dynamics for stories in English and French.
Another ground-breaking experiment which included bilingual Japanese women married to American men in San Francisco were
asked to complete sentences. The goal of the experiment was to investigate whether or not human feelings and thoughts
are expressed differently in different language mindsets.
Here is a sample from the the experiment:
English
Japanese
Real friends should
Be very frank
Help each other
I will probably become
A teacher
A housewife
When there is a conflict with family
I do what I want
It's a time of great unhappiness
More recent studies show, the language a person speaks affects
their cognition, behaviour, emotions and hence their personality.
This shouldn’t come as a surprise
since we already know that different regions
of the brain become more active depending on the person’s activity at hand. Since structure, information and especially
the culture of languages varies substantially and the language a person speaks is an essential element of daily life.
