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This probably doesn't effect the majority of the population because it refers to bilinguals.
This seems strange to me though because it suggests that bilinguals have no ability to think rationally. I speak french and english fluently so I fit into this category but I'm pretty stubborn, so I can't imagine that my opinions would change depending on which language I'm speaking in.
Will, this has more to do with the implicit association test. That test doesn't give you time to go back to your reasoned base of decisions to give an answer. It actually forces you to give an answer "on the fly".
I think that the point of the paper is not that bilingual people can't have a rational line of thought, but that the basic responses that we have in our day to day situations may be tinted by the "language glasses" that we are using at that time.
This is new? There's tons of langauge and cognitiion research that seems to have already suggested this many times over.
I do like the superfluous quoute from a famous person.
Yannisguerra- You make a good point, but I would still like to do the test myself and see I can't believe that my opinions would change depending on which language I was thinking in.
It seems to me that this is more about name association rather than anything else. i know someone by that name that was nice or mean, and that might change depending on the language I was speaking because I might think of different people that I associate with that language, but my opinions of any given person wouldn't change. Maybe it is the test upon which they base their conclusions that I do not like.
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