Question: do multi-lingual people think in their native language or others and what can affect this?

Jen Todd Jones answered on 12 Mar 2013:

Hi ubermidget

This is a great question and one I get asked a lot, from my experience talking with a lot of people from all over the world about their languages I think it depends on the country you’re in. One of our professors here at Bristol is Belgian, he grew up speaking English, French and Dutch, so I asked him what language he thought in. He told me that in England he thinks in English, when he goes back to Belgium it take maybe 5 to 7 days and then he’s back to thinking in French or Dutch because it’s all he can hear around him.

Lots of people tend to go by what language they dream in, people that were raised for a long time in one country often find that when they move to another they still sometimes dream in their original language – I think that’s a pretty good measure.

My experiments have shown that bilingual people do actually think in both languages at once, but they may not know this. If I asked a French/English bilingual if the word ‘proof’ was related to ‘house’ they’d probably say no, and they’d be right to! BUT if you look at the word ‘proof’ you’ll notice that inside it it the word ‘roof’ which definitely is related to the word ‘house’. It turns out that our brain is so clever that when we read we not only read the whole word, but all the words that might be buried inside it too! Further to this, if I ask these bilinguals if the word ‘lemur’ and ‘house’ is related then they’d again probably say no, but here we have a French word ‘mur’ meaning wall which related to ‘house’. Even when a French bilingual doesn’t even realise they have seen this, I have used electroencephalography to show that the part of their brain responsible for finding meaning increases in electrical activity when they see the words lemur and house, meaning the must have seen the hidden word ‘mur’ and understood its French meaning!