Language and the Bicultural Self

Abstract

In a study of bicultural individuals’ self-perceptions, Chinese-born students were randomly assigned to participate in either Chinese or English. Serving as controls, Canadian-born participants of either European or Chinese descent participated in English. The effects of the language manipulation paralleled findings in previous studies comparing East Asians to North Americans. Participants responding in Chinese reported more collective self-statements in open-ended self-descriptions, lower self-esteem on the Rosenberg scale, and more agreement with Chinese cultural views than did the remaining groups. In their self-descriptions, participants writing in Chinese provided similar numbers of favorable and unfavorable self-statements. The other groups reported more favorable self-statements. Participants reporting in Chinese indicated similar levels of positive and negative mood. The remaining groups reported more positive mood. The results suggest that East-Asian and Western identities may be stored in separate knowledge structures in bicultural individuals, with each structure activated by its associated language.

Language context guides memory content

“…Recent findings suggest that language-dependency effects are found not only in episodic memory, but also in self-construal (e.g., Ross, Xun, & Wilson, 2002) and in academic learning (e.g., Marian & Fausey, 2006). For example, Ross et al (2002) found that bilinguals differed in number of collective self-statements, self-esteem ratings, and cultural views when responding in their two languages.…”

“…For example, Ross et al (2002) found that bilinguals differed in number of collective self-statements, self-esteem ratings, and cultural views when responding in their two languages. For academic learning, Marian and Fausey (2006) found that bilinguals were better at remembering information (e.g., about history, chemistry, etc.)…”

Cultural Transmission of Self-Concept from Parent to Child in Chinese American Families: Does Language Matter?

“…Studies using selfdescriptions (Ross, Xun, & Wilson, 2002) and questionnaires, such as the Twenty Statement Questions (TST; Kuhn & McPartland, 1954), have consistently revealed that Euro-Americans provide more information about the independent self, such as personal attributes and beliefs (e.g., "I am tall, intelligent, good-natured") and less information about the interdependent self (e.g., "I am a son, a student, captain of the baseball team) compared to Asians (Bochner, 1994;Trafimow, Tirandis, & Goto, 1991;Wang, 2001). …”

Dreaming in Two Worlds and Two Languages: Bilingual Dreams and Acculturation Challenges

“…As a primary communications medium that conveys ideas and information between people (Crystal, 2006;Harley, 1997), language is the "product of culture" (Hamers & Blanc, 2003, p. 8) as well as the "key vehicle of culture" (Chien & Benerjee, 2002, p. 211), suggesting that a dream containing both one's first, native language and a secondarily acquired language could be a valuable source of information in understanding a bilingual immigrant's unconscious attitudes toward the two worlds that he or she inhabits. Indeed, Ross, Xun, and Wilson (2002) found that bilingual individuals have separate cultural identities activated by the language of the culture.…”

“…Bilingual individuals often feel in waking life that they have two different identities (Burck, 2004;Pang, 2009;Pavlenko, 2006), and that they have International Journal of Transpersonal Studies 3 Dreaming in Two Worlds and Two Languages separate identities that are activated by the language of the different cultures represented by those (Ross, Xun, & Wilson, 2002). According to Berry (2001), cultural identity consists of the attitudes individuals have about themselves in relation to membership in their cultural group.…”