Is it possible to think in a second language?

Question

Those who have learned a second language are guaranteed to consciously think of words and their corresponding meaning in your native language or vice versa.

This is common with more "complex" sentences, like "My favorite color is green.", rather than "Hi" or "Hello, how are you?" (The latter being a common phrase, so it needs no thinking in most languages.).

• Is it possible to stop the conscious act of translating your native language to your second language or vice versa?
• Is it possible to fully "think" in your second language?

Clarification: When you speak your native language you rarely think about the grammar and structure and it comes right out, I'm asking if that's possible with people who learned multiple languages.. can you think as if that language was native to you?

Further clarification: You know how a beginner of a foreign language usually cannot speak rapid-fire and has to think through every word and it's syntax, instead of making a flow of words automatically, you have to 'think' and fill in each word accordingly.

Example: When a person who natively speaks English talks, they can talk without having to think of word meanings as it is already implicitly processed by your sub-conscious.. but this flow usually stops when you..

Another example: Person A doesn't use the word "condescending" a lot, and has to return to the definition in her memory. She usually doesn't meet condescending people. She has met a person who has this attribute. In an argument she says "You're so --pause--, umm, hmm..", and in her mind she goes through a list of words (Mean, (I had to pause here to find a word for the example..) Defiant, Rude, etc.) until she reaches condescending.

That is the feeling of "thinking" I'm describing. A new learner of a second language has to "think" through everything, and my question is: Can you "think" in a second language without having to find and link words in your native language? Excluding young people exposed to both, but people who took classes and moved to a country to learn.

Answer 1

It is possible for some people to think in a second language. And given that you are asking about possibility, to some extent anecdotes are evidence.

• Many children who change linguistic communities at a young age lose the ability to talk in their first language. This is particularly the case where the first language is different to the language in which parents speak to their children.
• In less extreme cases I have friends who came to an English speaking country at a young age, but still retained the ability to speak in their native language. Nonetheless, the vast majority of the time, they speak English. I assume that at a certain point, they switched from primarily thinking in their native language to primarily thinking in English. One friend mentioned the experience of when at around age 14, his dreams began to switch from being in Polish to being in English.

I guess the interesting question is whether there are limits to this, such as when the second language is not learnt until teenage years or adulthood.

In terms of a few hypotheses, I would think that ability to think in a second language would be linked to (a) greater fluency with the second language which in turn would be linked to experience and training and (b) specific primary training in the content of the thoughts in the second language (e.g., if you study a subject at university in the second language and thus you may know the terms better in the second language). Also from my limited experience of learning French, it felt like there was a degree of choice whereby I could actively try to think in French. That said, the cognitive associations between underlying concept, English word, and French word were pretty strong. Thus, the subjective experience of thinking in French and translating from English to French was often subtle.

Note also that I'd still be interested in any research that has specifically studied this phenomena.

Answer 2

Is it possible to stop the conscious act of translating your native language to your second language or vice versa?

Many people have already commented that they certainly experience thinking in several languages. While this sort of phenomenal insight is interesting in itself, one key idea from cognitive science research is that introspection is not generally to be trusted when it comes to understanding cognitive processes (see for example the famous studies by Nisbett and Wilson). So both your conscious experience of thinking in your first language and my (or anyone else's) feeling of thinking in another language are not necessarily telling us much on how we think.

Is it possible to fully "think" in your second language?

I don't know but it's even possible to dispute the fact that you are thinking in a spoken language at all (see for example Jerry Fodor's “language of thought” hypothesis). Another view that is currently quite popular tries to account for abstract concepts in sensorial terms (cf. symbol grounding, some interpretations of “embodied cognition”, etc.) The idea is that when you are thinking about something, you are unconsciously manipulating sensory (visual, auditory…) representations, not linguistic ones (be it in a spoken language or some universal language of thought).

An example of an empirical result supporting this view is the “concept modality switch effect”: When asked to verify a property (e.g. “Can light flicker?”), participants are a little quicker if the previous question involved the same modality (in this case vision) rather than another one (say audition). This modality switch effect also exist when directly perceiving through two different modalities leading to the interpretation that to answer the question “Can light flicker?”, you are not merely retrieving some sort of symbolic knowledge (expressed in a language-dependent or language-independent manner) but actually visualizing/hearing/experiencing the relevant concept on a sensory level.

At the same time, you can also find theories purporting an influence in the other direction, in which the language one speaks changes the way one views the world all the way to pretty elementary perception (see Sapir-Whorf hypothesis). One area where this has been discussed and researched extensively is color perception, culminating in a big research project called the “World Color Survey” collecting data on color names in many cultures.

One line of research in this field uses differences between languages to track language influence on basic perceptual processes. For example some languages like Greek and Russian apparently have no word for “blue” but two words distinguishing different types of blue. The distinction between “dark blue” and “light blue” is obligatory when using these languages, you cannot say “blue” without specifying dark or light.

One intriguing result suggests that native Russian speakers are slightly quicker to distinguish two shades of blue that do not belong to the same linguistic categories whereas the effect does not exist for English speakers (Winawer, Witthoft, Frank, Wu, Wade & Boroditsky, 2007). Note that the task does not involve naming or remembering the color, only making a decision about two colors before you so it is pretty strong evidence that one does in fact “think” in a language (this is a complex question however, if you dig into this literature you will find that there is a lot of disagreement on various assumptions and methodological points regarding what is a basic color term, etc.).

Following the same line of inquiry, there is an empirical result that seem directly relevant to your question: Athanasopoulos (2009) used a color discrimination task with bilingual Greek/English participants (specifically Greek students in the UK). I don't remember all the details but he found that the effect varied depending on the level of acculturation (e.g. how long the participants spent in an English-speaking environment, how well they spoke English and at what age they learned it) and semantic availability of the relevant color terms (this was measured by asking people to list color names and counting how far down the list the different terms appeared). This suggests that, to the extent that language plays a role in perception, it is possible for a second language to have an influence but also that this is not an all or nothing proposition (i.e. the influence of the second language grows with increased exposure).

References:

• Athanasopoulos, P. (2009). Cognitive representation of colour in bilinguals: The case of Greek blues. Bilingualism, 12 (1), 83-95.
• Winawer, J., Witthoft, N., Frank, M.C., Wu, L., Wade, A.R., & Boroditsky, L. (2007). Russian blues reveal effects of language on color discrimination. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 104 (19), 7780-7785.