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'Arrival' was right — language can actually alter our experience of time

'Arrival' was right — language can actually alter our experience of time

In the film Arrival, Amy Adams plays linguist Louise Banks who is trying to decipher an alien language. My new study – which I worked on with linguist Emanuel Bylund – shows that bilinguals do indeed think about time differently, depending on the language context in which they are estimating the duration of events. The way that bilinguals handle these different ways of thinking has long been a mystery to language researchers.