Here’s an interesting experiment I would like to see. Look at adults who learned a second language as a child from one of their parents. For example, the father speaks only English but the mother speaks English and Hungarian. English is the standard language outside of the home.
Profile the personalities of the parents. Now have a Hungarian speaker interview the subject and profile his personality and separately have an English speaker profile the subject’s personality. Is the subject’s personality different in the two languages and is he more like his mother when speaking Hungarian?
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April 25, 2010 at 9:50 pm
RoyYii
Yes, the answer is yes for my case.
I speak like an adult with english, but many others say I speak like a child while im speaking chinese
April 25, 2010 at 10:14 pm
stefan
Yes, somebody should do this study. It seems intuitively true for myself, but I have wondered if my intuition is true in general.
April 26, 2010 at 7:02 am
isaac
My father learned hebrew as an adolescent and claims to be more aggressive (and adolescent) when he speaks hebrew.
April 27, 2010 at 6:07 pm
Claire
Any reason you’re limiting this to male children?
April 27, 2010 at 9:42 pm
jeff
🙂 no. just an arbitrary choice of pronoun gender. (someone should write a wordpress plugin that randomly switches the gender of personal pronouns every time a user views a post.)
July 13, 2010 at 8:36 pm
Language and Bias « Cheap Talk
[…] Nice. But this leaves open the possibility that, since Hebrew is the second language, all response times in the Hebrew treatment were increased simply making it harder to see the bias. I would still prefer a design like this one. […]
July 13, 2010 at 9:24 pm
twicker
Reminds me of Lera Boroditsky’s work (don’t worry: I’m going to link to it on your Arab Israeli post, too 🙂 ):
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/boroditsky09/boroditsky09_index.html