Psycholinguistics is a science at the intersection of psychology and linguistics. One of the latest discoveries in this area is that the language we speak influences where we look.
For example, when Anglophones hear the word "candle", they also look at candy, because two words have a common first syllable. In addition, bilinguals pay attention not only to words that sound similar in one language, but also to words that have similar sounds in both languages that they speak. When Russian-English bilinguals hear the word “marker”, they also look at “stamp”, although in English the words “marker” and “mark” have no phonetic relationship.
Even more striking is that speakers of different languages look at different things, even if they don't use the language at all.
Scientists asked the participants in the experiment a simple task: to find the object that they had seen before, among a number of similar ones. It turned out that their eyes moved differently depending on which language they spoke. For example, Anglophones, looking for a clock, also looked at the cloud. But the Spanishophones looked primarily at the gift, since the words "watch" and "gift" - reloj and regalo - sound similar in Spanish.
It turns out that this effect works not only within one language, but also between different languages that bilinguals possess. For example, when Spanish-English bilinguals hear the word duck, they also look at the shovel, because the words for duck and shovel - pato and pala - sound similar in Spanish.
The way the brain organizes and processes information can trigger a cascade of effects across our entire cognitive system. And this co-activation is not just limited to spoken languages. People who speak spoken and sign languages have also been found to be affected by these effects. For example, when bilinguals who know spoken English and American Sign Language (ASL) hear the word “paper,” they also look at cheese, since the words “paper” and “cheese” in ASL have three of the four components in common ( palm shape, its position and orientation, but not movement).
What do these results indicate? The main finding is that not only does language have a high degree of interactivity between words and concepts, but it also affects information processing in many other areas such as vision, attention, and cognitive control. What we look at, pay attention to, etc., on a daily basis, is conditioned by the language in which we speak. Moreover, this relationship can be directly measured.
The practical implications of this research concern consumer behavior (what we look at on supermarket shelves), military affairs (battlefield orientation), and art (what catches our eye). In other words, the statement that language affects the way you see the world should be taken not only as a metaphor, but also quite literally - right down to the mechanics of eye movement.
