Speaking two languages really could give you a split personality , researchers have found . They say that many speakers have entirely different personalities in each of the languages they speak . Previously research has even found those who are bilingual even see colours differently . Researchers say that speaking in another language can change our personality . 'Rather than ask whether speakers of different languages have different minds , he says , 'we ask , Can two different minds exist within one person ? ' said psycholinguist Panos Athanasopoulos of Lancaster University . 'The extent to which language affects this process has been the focus of a long-standing debate : Do different languages cause their speakers to behave differently ? , ' the team wrote . 'Here , we show that fluent German-English bilinguals categorize motion events according to the grammatical constraints of the language in which they operate . Athanasopoulos and colleagues were interested in a particular difference in how English and German speakers treat events . English has a grammatical toolkit for situating actions in time : ' I was sailing to Bermuda and I saw Elvis ' is different from ' I sailed to Bermuda and I saw Elvis . ' German does n't have this feature . As a result , German speakers tend to specify the beginnings , middles , and ends of events , but English speakers often leave out the endpoints and focus in on the action . Looking at the same scene , for example , German speakers might say , ' A man leaves the house and walks to the store , ' whereas an English speaker would just say , ' A man is walking . ' This linguistic difference seems to influence how speakers of the two languages view events , according to the research . 'First , as predicted from cross-linguistic differences in motion encoding , participants functioning in a German testing context prefer to match events on the basis of motion completion to a greater extent than participants in an English context . Learning to speak a second language at any point in your life could help keep your brain sharp as you age , a study suggests . The University of Edinburgh detected a pattern of slower mental decline among the bilingual in a group of 835 born in 1936 . They were given an intelligence test in 1947 at the age of 11 , then retested in their early 70s between 2008 and 2010 . A total of 262 participants could communicate in at least one language other than English . Of those , 195 learnt the second language before the age of 18 . Those who spoke two or more languages had significantly better cognitive abilities in their 70s than their peers . The strongest effect of bilingualism was seen in general intelligence and reading tests . 'Our study shows that bilingualism , even when acquired in adulthood , may benefit the ageing brain , ' study authors said . 'Second , when participants suffer verbal interference in English , their categorization behavior is congruent with that predicted for German and when we switch the language of interference to German , their categorization becomes congruent with that predicted for English . 'These findings show that language effects on cognition are context-bound and transient , revealing unprecedented levels of malleability in human cognition . ' Previous research found a similar result . Between 2001 and 2003 , linguists Jean-Marc Dewaele and Aneta Pavlenko asked over a thousand bilinguals whether they 'feel like a different person ' when they speak different langauges . Nearly two-thirds said they did . Scientists have also found that regularly speaking in a second language makes you literally see the world in a different way . Color perception is an ideal way of testing bilingual concepts because there is a huge variation between where different languages place boundaries on the color spectrum .
Researchers studied particular difference between English and German . Text: