Impact of personal traits on language preference by bilinguals.

Title

Impact of personal traits on language preference by bilinguals

Introduction

Correct switching of native and non-native languages is one of the major stumbling blocks of communication. The current study aimed to detect psychological characteristics that make bilinguals prefer one language to the other one.

Methods

54 healthy volunteers, aged 17 to 32 years and divided into two equal groups according to their mother tongue (Russian and Ukrainian), participated in this study. They listened to a set of 2-3 syllable emotion-laden words that express sense and value in Russian and Ukrainian (100 words each). After the experiment, the participants were asked to evaluate the stimuli words as "pleasant/unpleasant" and "relaxing/activating" on the scale from -5 to 5 based on the subjective personal experience. We used the Maslach Burnout Inventory, L.A. Regush technique of diagnostics of ability to predict and the Barratt Impulsiveness Scale.

Results

The level of emotional burnout did not differ significantly between the both groups of participants, which allowed us to exclude the influence of burnout on the perception of verbal stimuli. We detected a direct correlation between the negative perception of the non-native (Russian) language, high impulsiveness, low ability to predict and low flexibility of thinking.

Conclusion

Different subjective impulsivity of the both groups may indicate that the negative rating of language is also the result of impulsivity and reactivity. We argue that the people with the negative perception of the non-native (Russian) language have more rigid attitude towards the language and hardly tend to change their plans and behavior.