Becoming bilingual transforms our minds

The third insight is that learning a second language and becoming bilingual transforms our minds. It changes our brains and our identities, how we feel, what we remember, the decisions we make, and ideas and insights we have across languages. Bilinguals become slightly different versions of themselves when they switch languages. You may have heard the saying, "To know another language is to possess another soul." Knowing another language changes how we perceive the world, not only figuratively, but also quite literally, down to the mechanics of our eye movements. For example, it is well-known in psycholinguistics that words that share a formal meaning are quite activated in the mind. When an English speaker is being told to pick up a marker and there are marbles on the desk, they are likely to make eye movements to the marbles because marker and marbles share word onset. When you speak another language, form overlap can be not only within the language, but also across languages. In…