USING a different language can apparently change your personality - or your perception of someone else's.

That's what a study earlier this year at Baruch College, New York, and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee has shown up among bilingual Hispanic women: After being flashed TV advertisements in English and Spanish featuring actors in different settings, viewers classified those speaking in Spanish as 'more assertive' and 'extroverted' than the same actors in identical advertisements, now speaking in English.

To be sure, such a trend might reveal more about these specific viewers' projections on Spanish culture at large.

But it's interesting to see how even as we perceive people differently when they speak in different languages, we feel differently ourselves when we do so too.

Read the full story in Thursday's edition of The Straits Times' Life!