Being bilingual could lead one to possess a dual personality

Do you speak two languages with equal ease? You are likely to have a split personality, according to a research.

Researchers say that many speakers possess entirely different personalities in each of the languages they speak.

"Rather than ask whether speakers of different languages have different minds, we ask 'can two different minds exist within one person?' " Daily Mail quoted psycholinguist Panos Athanasopoulos from Lancaster University as saying.

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?

Athanasopoulos and colleagues were interested in a particular difference in how English and German speakers treat events.

They showed that fluent German-English bilinguals categorise motion events according to the grammatical constraints of the language in which they operate.

English has a grammar toolkit for situating actions in time while German does not 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.

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.

"... 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."

Scientists have also found that regularly speaking in a second language makes you literally see the world in a different way.