Person and language

I am Pinocchio

Following Viorica Marian’s The Power of Language. Multilingualism, Self and Society, in my blog last week I explained how knowing several languages has a positive influence on your perception of the world and on your health, and that it affects your emotions as well. However, the influence of knowing more than one language, and of language in general, goes much farther. It’s one of the main factors that make you the person who you are. Take memory. In the discussion on the question whether and to what extent you are the same person that you were many years ago, many philosophers ascribe a decisive role to memory: The idea is that, when as an adult you still remember what you did as a child, you as an adult are still the same person as the child whose deeds you remember (the so-called psychological continuity thesis). Here I don’t want to discuss the thesis as such (see my old blogs and see here), but in the present context it is important that what you remember is not independent of the language you used when you were acting in the past and of the language you use for recalling your past. The language you speak influences in at least three ways what you remember, so Marian (pp. 112 ff.):
1) Through language co-activation at the time of encoding
2) Through language dependent memory
3) Through the labels used in remembering.
1) This is about the same effect that appeared in the association test in my blog two weeks ago. After a certain event a monolingual English speaker will easily remember a fly and a flashlight if they happen together while a bilingual English-Spanish speaker may be more likely than a monolingual English speaker also remember the arrow (“flecha” in Spanish) passing by.
2) More interesting in view of the psychological continuity thesis is language dependent memory. This involves, so Marian (pp. 113-4), that “the likelihood of remembering something increases if you are using the same language that was used when the original event occurred… [Multilinguals] remember different things about their lives and recall information about the world differently in their native versus their second languages because the accessibility of those memories varies. What comes to the forefront changes across languages… In turn, the memories accessed influence how we think about ourselves and our lives and how we interact with others.” However, if this means that we remember different things about our youth dependent on the language we use and, maybe, that in the extreme case we must switch to the language we used when we were young in order to remember what we did then, this raises the intriguing question whether we are different persons dependent on the languages used. Even more, does this mean that when speaking a second language I am not identical with the child I was long ago, while I am still identical with this child if I speak my first language? Here it is not the place to try to answer this question, but I think that a further exploration of the issue would be an important contribution to the discussion on personal identity. It may throw a new light on the answers given so far.
3) A third factor that influences memory is how things are labelled in a language. For instance, Spanish uses two different words to refer to a corner, namely “rincón” (inside corner) and “esquina” (outside corner). Therefore, speakers of Spanish have better memory for where items are placed in a display that involves corners than speakers of English have. (Marian, pp. 115-6) Or, another example, in Dutch there is only one word for “male cousin” and “nephew”, namely “neef” (and one word for “female cousin and niece”: “nicht”). Think how much more difficult it is for a Dutch person to recall what kind of family relationship he or she has with a certain relative than for a Chinese who has already eight different words for “cousin”, depending on the relationship to him or her (on the maternal or paternal side; male or female; younger or older).
Many psychological investigations but also investigations in other fields ignore the languages the test persons speak. In addition, they ignore the question whether test persons are monolinguals or multilinguals and whether they are tested in their first languages or in a second language. As an example, I mentioned the discussion on the psychological identity thesis. Is this disregard of language right? I think that this blog makes clear that it is not. Humans, and certainly test persons, are not “language free”. What they feel, perceive, think, remember etc. depends to a great extent on the languages that they speak and that shaped them; on their mother tongues in the first place, but also on the other languages they learned. Language has a big impact on the person you are. One would almost say: Tell me which language you speak and I’ll say who you are. Or maybe even: Tell me which language you are speaking now and I’ll say who you are, at this moment.