Melina Aparici

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.

''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.

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.

Later Development of Relative Clauses Across Discourse Genres and Modalities of Production

In order to establish the developmental path of the types of relatives acquired at later ages, we investigate the use and development of relative clauses in a discourse-embedded context. In particular, we track the changes that relative clauses undergo both in form and function; and compare the use of these clauses in different contexts of discourse production. A database of 320 texts (narrative and expository texts, spoken and written) produced by 80 native speakers of Spanish from four age/schooling levels: 9, 12 and 17 year-olds, and adults is analyzed. According to our results, the use of relative clauses shows a developmental pattern that goes well beyond adolescence. With age, relative clauses undergo substantial changes, both from a structural and a discursive point of view. Significantly, these changes are constrained by the diverging communicative circumstances of text production, i.e. the longest developmental path for this type of clauses is observed in written discourse.

Corrigendum to ‘ “Piensa” twice: On the foreign language effect in decision making’ [Cognition 130 (2) (2014) 236–254]

a Center of Brain and Cognition, CBC, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, carrer Roc Boronat, 138, 08018 Barcelona, Spain b Institució Catalana de Recerca i Estudis Avançats (ICREA), Barcelona, Spain c Psychology Department, Hebrew University, Jerusalem 91905, Israel d Departament de Psicologia Bàsica, Evolutiva i de l’Educació, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Edifici B, 08193 Bellaterra, Barcelona, Spain e Department of Economics, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Ramon Trias Fargas, 25-27, 08005 Barcelona, Spain

The role of intentions and outcomes in the foreign language effect on moral judgements

We explore the origin of the foreign language effect on moral judgements by assessing whether language context alters the weight given to intentions and outcomes during moral judgement. Specifically, we investigated whether foreign language contexts, compared with native ones, may lead people to focus more on the outcomes of an action and less on the intentions behind it. We report two studies in which participants read scenarios in which the actor’s intentions and the resulting consequences were manipulated. As previously shown, people considered both the actor’s intentions and the action’s outcomes when assessing the damage, cause, moral wrongness, responsibility, and punishment deserved. However, although the foreign language context reduced the impact of intentions on damage assessment, the overall effect of intention and outcomes on these variables was mainly the same in the foreign and the native language contexts. We conclude that differential weighting of intentions and outcomes is unlikely to account for the impact of foreign language use on moral judgement.

The limits of the foreign language effect on decision-making: The case of the outcome bias and the representativeness heuristic

Language context (native vs. foreign) affects people’s choices and preferences in a wide variety of situations. However, emotional reactions are a key component driving people’s choices in those situations. In six studies, we test whether foreign language context modifies biases and the use of heuristics not directly caused by emotional reactions. We fail to find evidence that foreign language context modifies the extent to which people suffer from outcome bias (Experiment 1a & 1b) and the use of the representativeness heuristic (Experiment 2a & 2b). Furthermore, foreign language context does not modulate decision-making in those scenarios even when emotion is brought into the context (Experiment 1c & 2c). Foreign language context shapes decision-making, but the scope of its effects might be limited to decision-making tendencies in which emotion plays a causal role.

Introduction to Written and Spoken Language Development Across the Lifespan

Liliana Tolchinsky’s office is located in a modern, though architecturally bland, building, at the opposite end of the lush gardens that surround the main, historical building of the University of Barcelona. In a tiny office on the fifth floor, Liliana prepares lectures, receives students, writes articles, talks with colleagues and collaborators, and holds meetings with members of the research group that she has coordinated for almost 20 years. She has been in that office since the year 2000, after a long, sinuous path that took her from her native Buenos Aires, through Tel Aviv, and finally to Barcelona. She had arrived in the University of Barcelona some 10 years earlier, but it wasn’t until she joined the General Linguistics Department that Liliana found stability in the Academy and the institutional recognition that her research record and international impact deserved.

Adapting to the circumstances: on discourse competence in L2 Spanish / De la competencia discursiva en español L2 o de cómo adaptarse a las circunstancias

Abstract To characterize the discourse competence of second language (L2) Spanish speakers, we examine the narrative and expository texts produced by Korean and Moroccan Arabic learners of Spanish considering (1) whether the discourse connectivity patterns and the detachment devices used by these learners can be compared with those observed in the L1; and (2) whether non-native patterns are determined by L2 proficiency level. Results show that the use of different types of connectivity and detachment devices are not related with L2 proficiency level. From very early on, Spanish L2 learners are capable of adapting to the requirements imposed by communicative circumstances: they all produce well-organized texts and are capable of taking a stance when describing specific events. Data analysis indicates the convenience of revising the CEFR criteria for the assessment of L2 competence, and of taking into account learners’ discourse skills in the L1.