By Alan Yu
National Public Radio - January 02, 2014
Lera Boroditsky once did a simple experiment: She asked people to
close their eyes and point southeast. A room of distinguished professors
in the U.S. pointed in almost every possible direction, whereas
5-year-old Australian aboriginal girls always got it right.
She says .
Boroditsky, an associate professor of cognitive science at the
University of California, San Diego, says the Australian aboriginal
language doesn't use words like left or right. It uses compass points,
so they say things like "that girl to the east of you is my sister."
If
you want to learn another language and become fluent, you may have to
change the way you behave in small but sometimes significant ways,
specifically how you sort things into categories and what you notice.
Researchers are starting to study how those changes happen, says Aneta Pavlenko, a . She studies bilingualism and is the author of .
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