We make sense of objects and events around us by classifying them into identifiable categories. The extent to which language affects this process has been the focus of a long-standing debate: Do different languages cause their speakers to behave differently? Here, we show that fluent German-English bilinguals categorize motion events according to the grammatical constraints of the language in which they operate. First, as predicted from cross-linguistic differences in motion encoding, participants functioning in a German testing context prefer to match events on the basis of motion completion to a greater extent than participants in an English context. Second, when participants suffer verbal interference in English, their categorization behavior is congruent with that predicted for German and when we switch the language of interference to German, their categorization becomes congruent with that predicted for English. These findings show that language effects on cognition are context-bound and transient, revealing unprecedented levels of malleability in human cognition.

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Educational sojourns abroad are not only increasingly popular; it is also believed that they have many positive outcomes for students. The transformative potential of a study sojourn abroad has been claimed in linguistic and broader intercultural terms (e.g. Brown [2009] "The Transformative Power of the International Sojourn: An Ethnographic Study of the International Student Experience." Annals of Tourism Research 36 (3): 502-521; EYP [2014]. "Erasmus Exchange Programme." Accessed July 3. http://europa.eu/youth/article/erasmus-exchangeprogramme_en). However, whether and, if so, how prolonged exposure to multicultural study settings affects students' intercultural competence (IC) remains under-explored in the higher education context. This mixed methods longitudinal case study tracked a multinational group of international postgraduate students at a single British university (N = 223) in order to explore possible changes in IC over time. Quantitative questionnaire-based data were collected at two points in time (October and June), and qualitative data were obtained from a sub-sample of students (N = 20) who took part in semi-structured interviews throughout the academic year (October, February and June). The findings provide some indication for the malleability and dynamic nature of IC, challenge prior assertions and further complicate our understanding of the impact of a study sojourn abroad on IC. ARTICLE HISTORY