What is French for déjà vu? Descriptions of déjà vu in native French and English speakers

Little is known about how people characterise and classify the experience of déjà vu. The term déjà vu might capture a range of different phenomena and people may use it differently. We examined the description of déjà vu in two languages: French and English, hypothesising that the use of déjà vu would vary between the two languages. In French, the phrase déjà vu can be used to indicate a veridical experience of recognition - as in “I have already seen this face before”. However, the same is not true in English. In an online questionnaire, we found equal rates of déjà vu amongst French and English speakers, and key differences in how the experience was described. As expected, the French group described the experience as being more frequent, but there was the unexpected finding that they found it to be more troubling.