Alice Foucart

Your Morals Depend on Language

Should you sacrifice one man to save five? Whatever your answer, it should not depend on whether you were asked the question in your native language or a foreign tongue so long as you understood the problem. And yet here we report evidence that people using a foreign language make substantially more utilitarian decisions when faced with such moral dilemmas. We argue that this stems from the reduced emotional response elicited by the foreign language, consequently reducing the impact of intuitive emotional concerns. In general, we suggest that the increased psychological distance of using a foreign language induces utilitarianism. This shows that moral judgments can be heavily affected by an orthogonal property to moral principles, and importantly, one that is relevant to hundreds of millions of individuals on a daily basis.

Grammatical gender processing in L2: Electrophysiological evidence of the effect of L1 - L2 syntactic similarity

This study examines the effect of proficiency and similarity between the first and the second language on grammatical gender processing in L2. In three experiments, we manipulated gender agreement violations within the determiner phrase (DP), between the determiner and the noun (Experiment 1), the postposed adjective and the noun (Experiment 2) and the preposed adjective and the noun (Experiment 3). We compared the performance of German advanced learners of French to that of French native controls. The results showed a similar P600 effect for native and non-native speakers for agreement violations when agreement rules where similar in L1 and L2 (Experiment 1, depending on proficiency), whereas no effect was found for L2 learners when agreement rules varied across languages. These results suggest that syntactic processing in L2 is affected by the similarity of syntactic rules in L1 and L2.

''Piensa'' twice: On the foreign language effect in decision making

In this article, we assess to what extent decision making is affected by the language in which a given problem is presented (native vs. foreign). In particular, we aim to ask whether the impact of various heuristic biases in decision making is diminished when the problems are presented in a foreign language. To this end, we report four main studies in which more than 700 participants were tested on different types of individual decision making problems. In the first study, we replicated Keysar et al.s (2012) recent observation regarding the foreign language effect on framing effects related to loss aversion. In the second section, we assessed whether the foreign language effect is present in other types of framing problems that involve psychological accounting biases rather than gain/loss dichotomies. In the third section, we studied the foreign language effect in several key aspects of the theory of decision making under risk and uncertainty. In the fourth study, we assessed the presence of a foreign language effect in the cognitive reflection test, a test that includes logical problems that do not carry emotional connotations. The absence of such an effect in this test suggests that foreign language leads to a reduction of heuristic biases in decision making across a range of decision making situations and provide also some evidence about the boundaries of the phenomenon. We explore several potential factors that may underlie the foreign language effect in decision making.

Can bilinguals see it coming? Word anticipation in L2 sentence reading

Why is it more difficult to comprehend a 2nd (L2) than a 1st language (L1)? In the present article we investigate whether difficulties during L2 sentence comprehension come from differences in the way L1 and L2 speakers anticipate upcoming words. We recorded the brain activity (event-related potentials) of Spanish monolinguals, French-Spanish late bilinguals, and Spanish-Catalan early bilinguals while reading sentences in Spanish. We manipulated the ending of highly constrained sentences so that the critical noun was either expected or not. The expected and unexpected nouns were of different gender so that we could observe potential anticipation effects already on the article. In line with previous studies, a modulation of the N400 effect was observed on the article and the noun, followed by an anterior positivity on the noun. Importantly, this pattern was found in all 3 groups, suggesting that, at least when their 2 languages are closely related, bilinguals are able to anticipate upcoming words in a similar manner as monolinguals.

The effect of phonological realization of inflectional morphology on verbal agreement in French: Evidence from ERPs

The present study examined the impact of the phonological realization of morphosyntactic agreement within the inflectional phrase (IP) in written French, as revealed by ERPs. In two independent experiments, we varied the presence vs. absence of phonological cues to morphological variation. Of interest was whether a graded ERP response to these different conditions could be found in native speakers (Experiment 1), and whether non-native learners would benefit from the presence of phonological cues (Experiment 2). The results for native French speakers showed that compared to grammatically correct instances, phonologically realized inflectional errors produced a significant P600 response, which was statistically larger than that produced by errors that were silent. German L1-French L2 learners showed similar benefits of the phonological realization of morphemes. Phonologically realized errors produced a robust P600 response whereas silent errors produced no robust effects. Implications of these results are discussed in reference to previous studies of L2 acquisition of morphosyntax.

Using a Foreign Language Changes Our Choices

A growing literature demonstrates that using a foreign language affects choice. This is surprising because if people understand their options, choice should be language independent. Here, we review the impact of using a foreign language on risk, inference, and morality, and discuss potential explanations, including reduced emotion, psychological distance, and increased deliberation.

Determiner selection in romance languages: Evidence from French.

Determiner selection requires the retrieval of the nouns syntactic features (e.g., gender) and sometimes of its phonological features. Miozzo and Caramazza (1999) argued that the selection of determiners in Germanic languages is more straightforward than in Romance languages because it is not dependent on the phonological properties of the following word. In the present study, we used the picture-word interference paradigm to investigate the dependency of the determiner on the nouns features in French. In 3 experiments, we found a gender congruency effect at +200 stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA), indicating that participants were slower to produce the name of a picture (determiner + noun) when the picture-word pair was incongruent in gender than when it was congruent. We failed to replicate this effect at 0 SOA, in line with previous studies (Alario & Caramazza, 2002). Our results suggest that the features involved in determiner selection are not language specific but rather are specific to the determiner system.

Our Moral Choices Are Foreign to Us.

Though moral intuitions and choices seem fundamental to our core being, there is surprising new evidence that people resolve moral dilemmas differently when they consider them in a foreign language (Cipolletti et al., 2016; Costa et al., 2014a; Geipel et al., 2015): People are more willing to sacrifice 1 person to save 5 when they use a foreign language compared with when they use their native tongue. Our findings show that the phenomenon is robust across various contexts and that multiple factors affect it, such as the severity of the negative consequences associated with saving the larger group. This has also allowed us to better describe the phenomenon and investigate potential explanations. Together, our results suggest that the foreign language effect is most likely attributable to an increase in psychological distance and a reduction in emotional response.

Anticipation processes in L2 speech comprehension: Evidence from ERPs and lexical recognition task

The present study investigated anticipation processes in L2 speech comprehension. French–Spanish late bilinguals were presented with high-constrained Spanish sentences. ERPs were time-locked on the article preceding the critical noun, which was muted to avoid overlapping effects. Articles that mis-matched the gender of the expected nouns triggered a negativity. A subsequent lexical recognition task revealed that words expected from the context were (falsely) recognised significantly more often than unexpected words, even though all were muted. Overall, the results suggest that anticipation processes are at play during L2 speech processing, and allow creating a memory trace of a word prior to presentation.

How do you know I was about to say “book”? Anticipation processes affect speech processing and lexical recognition

Most event-related brain potential (ERP) studies that showed the role of anticipation processes during sentence processing focused on reading. However, in everyday conversation speech unfolds at higher speed; the present study examines whether comprehenders anticipate words when processing auditory sentences. In high-constrained Spanish sentences, we time-locked ERPs on the article preceding the critical noun, which was muted to avoid overlapping effects. Articles that mismatched the gender of the expected nouns triggered an early (200–280 ms) and a late negativity (450–900 ms), suggesting that anticipation processes are at play also during speech processing. A subsequent lexical recognition task revealed that (muted) “expected” words were (falsely) recognised significantly more often than (muted) “unexpected” words, and as often as “old” words that were actually presented. These results suggest that anticipation processes allow creating a memory trace of a word prior to presentation. The findings support a top-down view of spoken sentence comprehension.