Language alters our experience of time - 0 views
-
Lara Cowell on 19 Jun 17How do humans construct their mental representations of the passage of time? The universalist account claims that abstract concepts like time are universal across humans. In contrast, the linguistic relativity hypothesis holds that speakers of different languages represent duration differently. A 2017 study conducted by Panos Athanasopoulos, Professor of Linguistics and English Language at Lancaster University, and felllow linguist Emanuel Bylund, shows that bilinguals do indeed think about time differently, depending on the language context in which they are estimating the duration of events. Learning a new way to talk about time really does rewire the brain. Our findings are the first psycho-physical evidence of cognitive flexibility in bilinguals. It seems that by learning a new language, you suddenly become attuned to perceptual dimensions that you weren't aware of before. The fact that bilinguals go between these different ways of estimating time effortlessly and unconsciously fits in with a growing body of evidence demonstrating the ease with which language can creep into our most basic senses, including our emotions, our visual perception and now it turns out, our sense of time. But it also shows that bilinguals are more flexible thinkers and there is evidence to suggest that mentally going back and forth between different languages on a daily basis confers advantages on the ability to learn and multi-task, and even long term benefits for mental well-being.