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The study of how people process foreign languages has traditionally focused on the topics we wrestled with in high school French or Spanish classes -- botched grammar, misunderstood vocabulary, and mangled phonemes. But in recent years psychologists have gone to the laboratory with a phenomenon that historically was only discussed in memoirs by bilingual writers like Vladimir Nabokov and Eva Hoffman: a foreign language feels less emotional than the mother tongue. Consider the case of taboo words. For many multilinguals, swearing in a foreign language doesn't evoke the same anxiety (or bring the same emotional release) as using a native language. Decreased emotionality in a foreign language spans the gamut of emotions, from saying “I love you,” to hearing childhood reprimands, to uttering morally grave lies, or being influenced by persuasive messages in advertising.
Researchers have sought to understand the range and limits of these emotional language effects. Lower proficiency and/or late acquisition of the foreign language seems to be a crucial constraint. For people who grew up bilingual, skin conductance responses and self-reports were similar when listening to emotional phrases in either language. One method for finding new types of emotional-language effects is to examine areas where cognitive neuroscience reports that people can switch between analytical processing and emotional processing. Gut, automatic or instinctive reasoning is grounded in an emotional good-bad response. Alternatively, reasoning can be the result of a deliberative process that involves careful, logical analysis. Would bilinguals be more analytical and less emotional when making decisions in a foreign language?
Boaz Keysar, Sayuri Hayakawa, and Sun Gyu An of University of Chicago asked this question in a paper recently published in Psychological Science. They studied framing effects, a phenonmenon investigated by Daniel Kahneman and others. When a decision is verbally framed as involving a gain, humans prefer a sure outcome over a probabilistic outcome. When the same situation is framed as involving losses, people sometimes prefer to gamble. For example, given a scenario involving 600 sick individuals and two types of medicines to administer, research participants prefer the medicine which will save 200 people for sure, rather than the medicine which has a 1/3 chance of saving all 600 sick people and a 2/3 chance of saving no one. If the formally identical illness scenario is provided, but framed in terms of how many people will die, then research participants are more likely to choose the probabilistic option. Framing effects are one of the classic examples of how humans deviate from logical reasoning, and indeed, individuals with a propensity for logical reasoning, such as those with Asperger Syndrome, are less influenced by the verbal frame when making these types of decisions.
The Chicago researchers randomly assigned bilinguals to read and respond to decision-making scenarios using either their native or foreign language. Similar versions of the study were conducted in the U. S, France and Korea. This was important because a foreign language may feel more emotional when it is the language of daily life, as happens when studying at a foreign university. English was the first language for the U. S. participants and the foreign language for Korean participants. In France, English was the native language and the French was the foreign language but also language of immersion. Data from all three locations were consistent: the standard framing effects were found for the native language and were absent in the foreign language. The implication is that people were less influenced by emotional aspects of the scenarios when reading scenarios in their foreign language. This is an impressive finding since one might have supposed that the stress of using a less proficient language would diminish the cognitive resources needed for deliberative reasoning, thus pushing people to make gut, instinctive or emotional responses.
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Add CommentPlus ou moins d'accord car j'ai déjà souvent remarqué qu'écrire ou penser en anglais me faisait voir les choses différement de ce que je pensais en français. Ce qui prouverait aussi une autre observation, que les Anglais et surtout les Américains US caucasiens ont une vue étrangement limitée de certaines choses justement parce qu'ils sont monolingues. Par contre, quand je me fâche, la langue utilisée dépend du contexte. Par exemple, quand je fais une bêtise dans un contexte anglais, j'ai tendance à utiliser des insultes anglaises alors que si la même chose se fait en français je deviens très primitif en français. N'empêche que ma langue favorite pour les insultes est l'Anglais, mais je crois que ceci est surtout, ou en tout cas aussi, dû au fait que l'Anglais se prête tellement parfaitement pour toutes sortes d'insultes fracassantes. Par exemple, dire "baise-toi" est au meilleur des cas rigolo alors que son équivalent anglais est clair et net et d'une musicalité métal-hurlant incomparable. Bon, c'est pas tout, faut que je me grouille, il est midi et une côte à l'os m'appelle.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Psychologists are increasingly advising foreigners in the US ... to avoid conducting life-or-death conversations in a foreign language, such as ... undergoing police interrogation."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSo if you're an illegal alien, chances are most psychologists would recommend you not talk to the police; a professional doctor's proscription.
jctyler said "More or less agree because I have often noticed that writing or thinking in English made me see things differently than what I thought in French. Which proves also another observation, that the English and especially the U.S. Caucasian Americans have a strangely limited view of things precisely because they are monolingual. By cons, when I am angry, the language used depends on the context. For example, when I do something stupid in an English context, I tend to use English insults whereas if the same thing is in French I get very primitive in French. Nevertheless, my favorite language for slurs is English, but I think this is mainly, or at least too, because the English lends itself so perfectly to all kinds of insults sensational. For example, say "fuck you" is the best case funny while its English counterpart is crystal clear and a metal-screaming incomparable musicality. Well, it's not all, I have to swarm, it is midday and-bone calls me." Swarm away, dude! Thank you Google Translate....
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisActually, I think part of the problem is that different languages divide up the human experience differently. It is difficult to emotionally connect to another language when you know that the word does not mean exactly the same thing as it means in you native tongue. My native tongue is English but I also speak Spanish thanks to living in Puerto Rico for 40 years. Some words that apparently translate exact evoke the same emotion for me while other expressions do not. For example, "te amo" translates directly to "I love you" but the equivalent "te quiero" means "I love you" but literally translates to "I want you". It does not have the same emotional impact for me because my mind is still translating on the fly and "sees" the literal translation before it "sees" the emotional translation.
However, the fact that languages do divide the world up differently means that I have the ability to perceive the world more richly than if I knew just one language. There are things that can be better expressed in Spanish than in English and vice-versa. That means there are expressions in Spanish that can invoke an emotional response where the English version does not. Go figure....
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this<I think part of the problem is that different languages divide up the human experience differently>
Fully agree. Which I am tempted to sum up as the difference between a "côte à l'os", an "ossobucco" and a "bone rib" (marrowbone).
<Google Translate....>
... will definitely miss the ridicule in "baise-toi"*. And an insult's "musicalité métal-hurlant" (heavy-metal musicality) is simply beyond it. But as long as one sticks to standard language it has become a great tool.
Every kid should learn two languages.
That was an OK translation by Google translate. It rates a C, maybe a C+.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI use both English and Cantonese. I switch languages frequently, even in mid sentence, to use whichever language I find more appropriate to my thought processes. So how would you discover framing effects in somebody like me?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI grew up immersed in Madarin and Suzhouness( a dialect different from Madarin) and I am comfortable dealing with these two languages. I also speak English and French. For me, resoning and responding in Madarin or Suzhouness can be considered as subconscious while speaking English and French takes me a little bit more time for my brain to precess the info I guess. One is the language you grow up with, another is what you learned...
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI also seem to remember that a main and very interesting difference between Chinese and occidental languages is the consequences from using symbols instead of letters for writing and how this influences how the brain processes information. Which would in part explain why the Chinese use their brains' hemispheres differently in some cases. Some disadvantages in some areas but improved left-right hand/foot management if I remember correctly. Whereas Arabic is another game altogether.
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