Do bilinguals see the world differently?: The conceptual transfer of colors and motion events by Japanese children at an English immersion school

This study explores how learning a second/foreign language may affect cognition by studying second and fifth grade Japanese-English bilingual children (n=10 respectively) on color and motion event cognitions vis-a-vis English-speaking monolingual counterparts (n=12 and n=10 respectively). There has been a resurgent interest in linguistic relativity in recent years, that is, the relationship between language and cognition. However, many of the extant studies focus on monolingual speakers and compare cross-linguistic differences. In the current study, the focus was placed on Japanese-English bilingual children whose language pair (i.e., Japanese and English) and ages (7-8 years and 10-11 years) have rarely been investigated. Moreover, this study ambitiously examined the degree of language effect on two qualitatively different cognitive domains, vis., colors and motion events.;The results revealed certain tendencies vis-a-vis the relationship between language and cognition. First, color cognition is more susceptible to a second/foreign language effect than motion event cognition among the bilingual participants. Second, in each cognitive domain, linguistic-mediated tasks generated stronger language influence than non-linguistic tasks. Third, both first (i.e., Japanese) and second (i.e., English) language development affected the degree of language effect on cognition. Overall, this study supports both linguistic relativity and thinking-for-speaking hypotheses in terms of the extent that language affects color and motion event cognitions by employing both linguistic-mediated and non-linguistic tasks.