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Comment by Dansvidania | Hacker News Reader

I happened to write my bachelors thesis on the effect of mother-tongues on cognitive processes in 2012 and found the literature very vague on this issue.

At the time the literature suggested that the cognitive processes are the same across populations of different mother-tongues but that language can influence the data those processes work upon, EG: exposed to the same events, what details get picked up, built into narratives and remembered.

I would move that language constitutes a very strong mnemonic anchor if nothing else.

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Do you know of any research into bilingual people and the effect of switching languages? I feel like I become an almost different person if I switch back to speaking Dutch for more than a day.

I'm not fluent in anything but English, but I've had some basic exposure to a few other languages. I've found when travelling that trying to struggle by in another country's language (avoiding English) is almost like reformatting my brain. It takes a few days to to reach the point where my surface thoughts are in the new language, but at the same time, my knowledge of the new language is so primitive that those thoughts can't have any complexity. I've wondered if that's anything like the mind-emptiness that Zen meditators are known to seek. Of course I could switch back to English when I had to.

I'm pretty sure that doing this a few times made my English permanently worse. I guess it's ok since I'm not a literary stylist or anything like that, but it's something to be aware of.

Maybe study a bit of ancient Greek or Latin to boost your English a little.

> I'm pretty sure that doing this a few times made my English permanently worse. I guess it's ok since I'm not a literary stylist or anything like that, but it's something to be aware of.

Oh, that's just your brain suffering from hash collisions during lookup for words. After a while it adapts and switches to a new data structure, speaking from experience.

I don’t, but anecdotally I know this to be true. I speak 4 languages pretty fluently and I can confidently say that my personality is different depending on which language I am using. I only got to experience this well after having left university and all my academic aspirations so never got deeper than experiencing it first person.

Just for fun, I theorised that it’s a rewinding to the emotional states - and consequently behaviours - I had when getting proficient in the language.

Well, for what it's worth, that was my hypothesis as well for explaining my anecdotal experience with this! I switched to effectively speaking English full-time in my late twenties, due to having a foreign partner and later moving abroad with her. I've noticed that I emotionally regress a little bit to teen/tween behavior and anxieties whenever I speak Dutch again for longer periods of time.

This effect is at its strongest when I'm visiting my parents in the Netherlands, so there's an obvious location-component to it as well. Linking places to emotional states is pretty well established IIUC, so the latter shouldn't be surprise.

I was participant in an fMRI study (done as PhD work by a computational linguist) that contrasted native speakers of German and Polish, showing that phonemes that exist in your native tongue are processed in different areas of your brain than phonemes that are non-native to you.

I would be interested in reading that.

Well even the language you speak affects your breathing patterns and mouth posture so.

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