Previous studies have demonstrated that there is a tight link between grammatical concepts and cognitive preferences in monolingual speakers (Lucy 1992 Lucy, J. A. 1992. Grammatical categories and cognition. A case study of the linguistic relativity hypothesis, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar], Lucy & Gaskins 2003 Lucy, J. A. and Gaskins, S. 2003. “Interaction of language type and referent type in the development of nonverbal classification preferences”. In Language in mind: Advances in the study of language and thought, Edited by: Gentner, D. and Goldin-Meadow, S. 465–492. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. [Google Scholar], Imai & Gentner 1997 Imai, M. and Gentner, D. 1997. A crosslinguistic study of early word meaning: Universal ontology and linguistic influence. Cognition, 62: 169–200. [Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar], Imai & Mazuka 2003 Imai, M. and Mazuka, R. 2003. “Re-evaluating linguistic relativity: Language-specific categories and the role of universal ontological knowledge in the construal of individuation”. In Language in mind: Advances in the study of language and thought, Edited by: Gentner, D. and Goldin-Meadow, S. 429–464. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. [Google Scholar]). Recent research has also shown that bilinguals with languages that differ in their concepts may shift their cognitive preferences as a function of their proficiency (Athanasopoulos, 2006 Athanasopoulos, P. 2006. Effects of the grammatical representation of number on cognition in bilinguals. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 9: 89–96. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) or cultural immersion (Cook, Bassetti, Kasai, Sasaki, & Takahashi, 2006 Cook, V. J., Bassetti, B., Kasai, C., Sasaki, M. and Takahashi, J. A. 2006. Do bilinguals have different concepts? The case of shape and material in Japanese L2 users of English. International Journal of Bilingualism, 10: 137–152. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]). The current short paper assesses the relative impact of each of these variables, and furthermore asks whether bilinguals alternate between two distinct cognitive representations of language-specific concepts depending on the language used in the experiment. Results from an object classification task showed that Japanese–English bilinguals shifted their behaviour towards the second language (L2) pattern primarily as a function of their L2 proficiency, while cultural immersion and language of instruction played a minimal role. These findings suggest that acquisition of novel grammatical categories leads to cognitive restructuring in the bilingual mind and have implications for the relationship between language and cognitive processing.
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