ArticlePDF Available

Abstract and Figures

Bilingualism can have widespread cognitive effects. In this article we investigate whether bilingualism might have an effect on adults' abilities to reason about other people's beliefs. In particular, we tested whether bilingual adults might have an advantage over monolingual adults in false-belief reasoning analogous to the advantage that has been observed with bilingual children. Using a traditional false-belief task coupled with an eye-tracking technique, we found that adults in general suffer interference from their own perspective when reasoning about other people's beliefs. However, bilinguals are reliably less susceptible to this egocentric bias than are monolinguals. Moreover, performance on the false-belief task significantly correlated with performance on an executive control task. We argue that bilinguals' early sociolinguistic sensitivity and enhanced executive control may account for their advantage in false-belief reasoning.
Content may be subject to copyright.
RESEARCH REPORT
Reasoning About Other People’s Beliefs: Bilinguals Have an Advantage
Paula Rubio-Ferna´ndez and Sam Glucksberg
Princeton University
Bilingualism can have widespread cognitive effects. In this article we investigate whether bilingualism
might have an effect on adults’ abilities to reason about other people’s beliefs. In particular, we tested
whether bilingual adults might have an advantage over monolingual adults in false-belief reasoning
analogous to the advantage that has been observed with bilingual children. Using a traditional false-belief
task coupled with an eye-tracking technique, we found that adults in general suffer interference from their
own perspective when reasoning about other people’s beliefs. However, bilinguals are reliably less
susceptible to this egocentric bias than are monolinguals. Moreover, performance on the false-belief task
significantly correlated with performance on an executive control task. We argue that bilinguals’ early
sociolinguistic sensitivity and enhanced executive control may account for their advantage in false-belief
reasoning.
Keywords: bilingual cognition, theory of mind, false-belief reasoning, executive control, eye tracking
Experience can have powerful effects on cognitive abilities. For
example, London taxi drivers have enlarged regions of the hip-
pocampus involved in spatial navigation, and the extent of this
enlargement correlates positively with the time spent taxi driving
(Maguire et al., 2003). Action video-game playing enhances visual
selective attention (Green & Bavelier, 2003). Canadian postal
workers who regularly process letters and digits together in postal
codes have better integration of letter and digit processing than do
people without this experience (Polk & Farah, 1998). Experience
with a variety of cognitive tasks across the life span increases
cerebral reserve, reflecting the protective effect of intellectual
exercise against cognitive decline with aging (Valenzuela & Sa-
chdev, 2006).
Bilingualism provides experiences that can lead to various cog-
nitive effects but with mixed outcomes (Bialystok, 2009; Bialystok
& Craik, 2010). On the negative side, bilingual children have a
smaller vocabulary in each language than do their monolingual
peers (Oller & Eilers, 2002), and bilingual adults underperform in
word retrieval tasks relative to monolinguals, partly because of the
interference of their other language (Kaushanskaya & Marian,
2007). On the positive side, bilingual language production requires
constant monitoring of the target language in order to minimize
interference from the competing language. This requires the exer-
cise of executive control, which in turn should strengthen a per-
son’s executive control system (Bialystok, 2009; Bialystok &
Craik, 2010; cf. Costa & Santesteban, 2004, for an alternative
model of bilingual speech production without inhibitory control).
Bilinguals’ advantage in executive control tasks has been found in
children as well as in young and older adults (Bialystok, Craik,
Klein, & Viswanathan, 2004; Carlson & Meltzoff, 2008; Costa,
Herna´ndez, & Sebastia´n-Galle´s, 2008).
Bilingual children also perform better in false-belief tasks than
do their monolingual peers (Goetz, 2003; Kova´cs, 2009). False-
belief tasks have been a key test of social cognition develop-
ment—as well as being used in the diagnosis of autism and related
disorders—for more than 2 decades (Onishi & Baillargeon, 2005;
Wellman, Cross, & Watson, 2001; Wimmer & Perner, 1983). In
the classic Sally–Anne task (Baron-Cohen, Leslie, & Frith, 1985),
children are presented with two puppets, Sally and Anne, who are
playing with a toy. When they finish playing, they put the toy into
a box and Anne leaves the scene. While she is away, Sally moves
the toy to a different box. When Anne comes back, the child is
asked where she will look for the toy. Monolingual children
around the age of 4 years typically answer correctly that she will
look for the toy in the original container. However, younger
monolingual children as well as some autistic individuals tend to
respond according to their own knowledge of the situation, thus
failing to show an appreciation of Anne’s false belief about the
location of the toy. In contrast, bilingual children as young as 3
years have shown a precocious success in false-belief tasks (Goetz,
2003; Kova´cs, 2009).
This article was published Online First August 29, 2011.
Paula Rubio-Ferna´ndez and Sam Glucksberg, Department of Psychol-
ogy, Princeton University.
This research was supported by a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow-
ship awarded to the first author and by a Marie Curie Outgoing Interna-
tional Fellowship awarded to both authors (Project 022149). We thank
Ellen Bialystok and Marianne Gullberg for their advice on the distinction
between bilinguals and monolinguals and to Natalie Sebanz for her sug-
gestions for the Simon task. Special thanks to Pedro Montoro and Mark
Pinsk for their technical help. Thanks to Albert Costa, Robyn Carston, Kay
Deaux, Susanne Grassmann, and Boaz Keysar for their comments on early
drafts of the article.
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Paula
Rubio-Ferna´ndez, Department of Psychology, Princeton University, Green
Hall, Princeton, NJ 08540. E-mail: prubio@princeton.edu
Journal of Experimental Psychology: © 2011 American Psychological Association
Learning, Memory, and Cognition
2012, Vol. 38, No. 1, 211–217 0278-7393/11/$12.00 DOI: 10.1037/a0025162
211
The extent to which young children may fail traditional false-
belief tasks because they are not able to appreciate another per-
son’s beliefs or because they are not able to inhibit their own
knowledge of the situation has been a recurrent theme in the
developmental literature (Perner & Lang, 1999; Wellman et al.,
2001). Bilingual children’s advantage in traditional false-belief
tasks might well be related to both factors. Bilingual children must
develop an early sociolinguistic sensitivity to the language knowl-
edge of their interlocutors because they must use their languages
accordingly (Genesee, Boivin, & Nicoladis, 1996; Genesee, Nico-
ladis, & Paradis, 1995). Even though this fundamental aspect of
bilingual children’s experience has not been investigated in the
context of false-belief reasoning, their awareness that other people
do not always speak the same languages as they do might be an
early form of appreciating that other people might have a different
perspective from their own. Moreover, this early form of perspec-
tive taking is combined with an early developed executive control
system that is necessary to focus on the target language and avoid
interference from the contextually inappropriate linguistic system
(Kova´ cs & Mehler, 2009). Their advanced executive control
would help bilingual children inhibit their own perspective in
false-belief tasks (Kova´cs, 2009). In general, language learning
itself can promote the development of children’s theory of mind
their understanding of other people’s mental states and intentions
(Pyers & Senghas, 2009).
Although it has been established that at around 4 years of age
children are able to pass standard false-belief tasks (Wellman et
al., 2001), more recent studies using eye-gaze measures to monitor
infants’ expectations have suggested that even 15-month-old in-
fants might be able to succeed in nonverbal versions of the false-
belief task (Onishi & Baillargeon, 2005; Southgate, Senju, &
Csibra, 2007). Nevertheless, although infants might be able to pass
nonverbal versions of the false-belief task and older children
perform optimally in standard false-belief tasks, adults’ perfor-
mance on a variety of judgment tasks can still be affected by the
curse of knowledge—a tendency to be biased by their own knowl-
edge of the situation (Birch & Bloom, 2007; Camerer, Lowenstein,
& Weber, 1989; Kelley & Jacoby, 1996; Keysar, 1994). It is
therefore possible that, using sufficiently fine grained measures,
adults might reveal an egocentric bias in their performance on a
standard false-belief task.
We investigated the false-belief reasoning abilities of adult
bilinguals relative to monolinguals using a standard false-belief
task coupled with an eye-tracking technique. Monitoring partici-
pants’ eye movements during performance in the traditional Sally–
Anne task should enable us to observe the effects of the curse of
knowledge in adult false-belief reasoning. If adult participants first
consider the container where they know the toy is before taking the
perspective of the mistaken story character, then this would im-
plicate an egocentric bias. Recent eye-tracking research has shown
that adult participants do suffer from an egocentric bias when
performing referential communication tasks (Epley, Morewedge,
& Keysar, 2004; Keysar, Barr, Balin, & Brauner, 2000; Keysar,
Lin, & Barr, 2003). For example, in following the instruction
“Move the small candle,” participants tend to initially consider the
smallest of three candles on display, even though that particular
candle is not visible to the speaker and therefore cannot be the
intended target.
If eye movements reveal an egocentric bias in adult false-belief
reasoning, do bilingual participants suffer less from the curse of
knowledge than do monolinguals? Given their sociolinguistic sen-
sitivity to the language background of their interlocutors as well as
their enhanced executive control, bilingual adults may maintain an
advantage in false-belief reasoning analogous to the advantage
found in bilingual children (Goetz, 2003; Kova´cs, 2009).
Method
Participants
We tested 46 undergraduates at Princeton University: 23 bilin-
guals and 23 monolinguals. All participants were to some extent
familiar with a second language. For the purpose of the study, we
were interested in distinguishing those participants who had been
regularly using two languages for most of their lives from those
who had not. The two main criteria for classifying our participants
as bilinguals or monolinguals were (a) for how many years they
had known a second language and (b) how regularly they had had
to switch between their first and second languages in that time. To
obtain this information, we used the Language History Question-
naire (Gullberg & Indefrey, 2003).
We established that the bilinguals in our sample should have
learned a second language (L2) before age 9 and have been using
it regularly for 10 years or more. The mean age of acquisition of
the L2 was 3, and the mean number of years of use of the L2 was
16. The bilinguals in our sample had learned their L2 in (a) a
bilingual household (12 participants), (b) a monolingual household
using a language foreign to the country of residence (six partici-
pants), or (c) a bilingual school (five participants). The bilinguals
in our group would have therefore had to switch languages daily or
almost daily for a number of years. The L2s in our sample were
Spanish (5), Chinese (8), Hindi (1), Korean (2), Russian (1),
Hebrew (2), French (2), Farsi (1), and Japanese (1).
1
Because all participants in the study were Princeton students,
both bilingual and monolingual participants were recruited from a
selective pool of high-performance students who had been ac-
cepted into university under rigorous academic criteria. Given our
samples, no important differences in IQ or verbal ability would be
expected. The mean age was 19.7 years for the bilinguals and 19.4
1
Having a collectivistic cultural background might give people an
advantage in perspective taking (Wu & Keysar, 2007). However, this
advantage seems to be observable only in individuals who were born and
brought up in collectivistic countries. Wu and Keysar (2007) failed to find
this effect in American Chinese students, whereas an advantage was found
when comparing Chinese students who had arrived in the United States
within the last year and American students (B. Keysar, personal commu-
nication, April 24, 2009). In our sample, 12 bilingual participants had an
Asian collectivistic background, although five of those participants had
been born in the United States. Three participants in our monolingual group
also had an Asian collectivistic background. It was not originally our
intention to investigate the effects of cultural background on false-belief
reasoning. However, given the considerable number of Asian participants
in our sample, we decided to further analyze our data comparing Asian
collectivistic participants (n15) and non-Asian individualistic partici-
pants (n31) alongside the main comparisons between monolinguals and
bilinguals.
212 RUBIO-FERNA
´NDEZ AND GLUCKSBERG
years for the monolinguals. Of the 23 bilingual participants, 15
were female; of the 23 monolinguals, 12 were female. All partic-
ipants had either been born in the United States (65% of bilinguals
and 87% of monolinguals) or moved to the United States or to
another English-speaking country by age 12. Crucially, at the time
they took part in the study, English was the dominant language of
all participants, whether bilingual or monolingual.
Sally–Anne Task
Procedure. The false-belief task was an extended computer
version of the classic Sally–Anne task. Two kindergarten charac-
ters, Sally and Anne, interacted in an animated cartoon. Each child
had a favorite toy and a container in which she kept it before going
home every day. Participants were familiarized with the setting of
the story in two warm-up trials before they were tested in the
following two different conditions:
False-belief (FB) condition: Anne puts her doll in her basket
and goes home. While she is away, Sally moves Anne’s doll
from the basket to the box. When Anne comes back the next
day, participants are asked “Where will she look for her
doll?”
True-belief (TB) baseline: Sally puts her horse in her box and
goes home. Anne was also going to put her doll in her basket,
but because her basket is getting full, she decides to put it in
the box. When Anne comes back the next day, participants
are asked “Where will she remember to go and find her
doll?”
2
The FB condition is the standard Sally–Anne scenario in which
Anne erroneously believes that her doll is in the basket where she
left it. The TB condition served as a baseline for FB because
Anne—like the participants—is correct about the location of her
doll. Because the TB baseline was always presented after the FB
condition, we used a different comprehension question in the TB
condition in order to avoid facilitation due to repetition of the
question. Given the greater syntactic complexity of the TB ques-
tion, however, longer response times (RTs) were expected in the
baseline condition. Because predictability was a potential issue for
finding evidence of an egocentric bias with a simple task, partic-
ipants were tested in only one trial per condition, with the first
experimental trial always corresponding with the FB condition. In
order to separate the trials clearly, a short clip with an adaptation
of a traditional children’s song was played after each scene.
Unlike the young children for whom the task was originally
designed, adult participants were expected to respond to the FB
question correctly. Any evidence of the curse of knowledge in this
population should be observed only in their eye movements and
RTs.
Participants were given standard instructions that described their
role as a control group in an experiment aimed at children. Par-
ticipants watched the Sally–Anne cartoon on a computer screen
and listened to the accompanying story, which lasted approxi-
mately 4 min. At different points in the story they were asked a
comprehension question, which they answered using one of two
labeled keys on the computer keyboard. The position of the box
and basket keys was symmetric to that of the containers on the
screen. In order to avoid any possible bias related to a differential
left- and right-hand dominance, participants were asked to press
the response keys with their dominant hand.
In order to maximize the extent of eye movements, immediately
before each comprehension question the containers disappeared
from the scene while the narrative continued. Then Anne reap-
peared on the lower center of the screen to make sure that all
participants were fixating on the same point when the two con-
tainers reappeared in the top corners of the screen (see Figure 1).
The presentation of the display where the containers reappear on
the screen was taken as the onset for eye fixations. The containers
reappeared at the onset of the verb in the questions in order to
obtain an accurate measure of the initial stages of perspective
taking. A fixation was defined as an eye movement that remained
on one of the target areas of interest for a minimum of 100 ms. The
onset for RTs corresponded with the offset of the question.
Results.
Gaze direction. The first measure that we used was direction
of first fixation in the FB condition. That is, on which target
participants first fixated when the containers reappeared on the
screen during the FB question. Overall, 19 participants (41.3%)
looked first at the correct container where the child had left her toy,
whereas 26 participants (56.5%) revealed an egocentric bias, look-
ing first at the container where they knew the toy was before
correcting this tendency and focusing their gaze on the correct
container. One monolingual participant did not fixate on either
container before responding to the question.
Considering bilinguals and monolinguals separately, 13 bilin-
gual participants (56.5%) gazed directly at the correct container,
whereas only six monolinguals (26.1%) did so, with the majority
of monolingual participants revealing an egocentric bias (see Fig-
ure 2). This difference is reliable,
2
(1, N45) 3.94, p.048.
Whereas in the FB condition the wrong container represented
the participants’ privileged knowledge of the location of the toy
and the correct container represented the character’s perspective,
in the TB baseline there was no competition between the two
targets. It is interesting that in the TB condition, 21 bilingual
participants (91.3%) and 18 monolingual participants (78.3%) first
fixated on the correct target, which did not result in a reliable
difference,
2
(1, N46) 1.52, p.218.
Fixation latency. The second eye-tracking measure was fix-
ation latencies on the correct container in the FB condition. That is,
how long it took participants to first fixate on the correct target
when the containers reappeared on the screen at the end of the FB
question. Data points that were above 2.5 standard deviations over
the group’s mean fixation latency on the correct target were
discarded as outliers. Outlying responses (two in the bilingual data
set and two in the monolingual data set) as well as data points that
did not reveal a fixation on the correct target (one in the bilingual
data set and three in the monolingual data set) were replaced by the
group’s mean fixation latency on the correct target without the
outlying responses.
Given the larger number of first fixations on the wrong con-
tainer among monolingual participants, bilingual participants were
on average faster at first fixating on the correct target (mean 619
ms) than were the monolingual participants (mean 812 ms; see
2
Given the syntactic ambiguity of the TB question, the intended reading
was stressed in the recording of the materials.
213
BILINGUAL ADVANTAGE IN FALSE-BELIEF REASONING
Figure 3). This difference was reliable, t(44) 2.07, p.045,
thus confirming the better performance of the bilingual group.
Response time. The third measure was RTs for the FB and TB
questions. Data points that were above 2.5 standard deviations
above the group’s mean RTs for each condition were discarded as
outliers. Outlying responses (one bilingual) as well as data points
that revealed a second press on the response key (i.e., the partic-
ipant had first pressed the response key before the offset of the
question; one bilingual and one monolingual) were replaced by the
group’s mean RT in that condition without the outlying responses.
Given that we used a different question for the FB condition and
the TB baseline—with the second question eliciting much longer
RTs than the first one because of its greater syntactic complexity
(see Figure 4)—we computed the relative difference between
participants’ RTs to the TB question and the FB question over the
TB baseline. This relative measure of RT did not reveal a reliable
difference between the two groups, t(44) 1.52, p.135,
suggesting that RTs might be less sensitive than eye-movement
measures.
Regarding baseline performance, RTs to the TB question did not
differ reliably for bilinguals (M1,692 ms) and monolinguals
(M1,563 ms), t(44) 1.38, p.175. We take the bilinguals’
comparable RTs in the TB baseline as evidence that this group was
not overall superior to the monolingual group in the context of this
experiment.
3
RTs to the FB question did not differ reliably for bilinguals
(M916 ms) and monolinguals (M1,042 ms), t(44) 0.891,
p.378. RTs therefore seem to be less sensitive than eye-tracking
measures, which did reveal a reliable difference between bilinguals
and monolinguals in the FB condition. When we collapsed the RTs
for bilinguals and monolinguals and divided them between those
who first fixated on the correct container (M812 ms) and those
who did not (M1,097 ms), we also observed a reliable differ-
ence, t(44) 2.05, p.048. Given that this pattern of RTs was
driven by accuracy of first fixation and significantly more bilin-
guals than monolinguals first fixated on the correct container, it is
likely that with a larger sample of participants, a reliable difference
in favor of the bilingual group might also be observed in the RT
measure.
4
Simon Task
Procedure. After completing the Sally–Anne task, partici-
pants were given a version of the Simon task in order to assess
their level of executive control (O’Leary & Barber, 1993). In this
task, participants had to press a right-hand key when they saw the
word RIGHT on the computer screen and a left-hand key when
they saw the word LEFT. In the baseline condition, the location
of the words on the computer screen matched the actual words
3
It has been documented that English–Spanish bilinguals, for example,
might show parsing preferences when processing certain syntactically
ambiguous constructions because of interference from their other language
(see Desmet & Duyck, 2007, for a review). This could suggest that at least
some of the bilinguals in our sample might have had problems parsing the
TB question—even though the intended reading was stressed in the re-
cording. However, recent studies have shown that the erosion of parsing
strategies in the first language occurs only after prolonged immersion in an
L2 environment (Dussias, 2004; Dussias & Sagarra, 2007). Because all
bilingual participants in our study had English as their dominant language
and had been living in an English-speaking country for the last 10 years or
more, we assumed that their parsing preferences would have been compa-
rable to those of the monolinguals in our study.
4
The comparison between Asian collectivistic and non-Asian individu-
alistic participants did not reveal any reliable results in the analyses of gaze
direction, fixation delay, and RT in the Sally–Anne task.
Figure 1. Display from the Sally–Anne cartoon corresponding with the
question “Where will she look for her doll?”
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
*
0
10
20
30
40
50
BILINGUALS MONOLINGUALS
Percentage of Participants
Figure 2. Percentage of participants (standard error of the means) who
first fixated on the correct container in the false-belief condition.
p
.049, two-tailed.
500
600
700
800
900
1000 *
0
100
200
300
400
BILINGUALS MONOLINGUALS
Fixation latency (ms)
0
Figure 3. Mean fixation latencies (standard error of the means) on the
correct container in the false-belief condition.
p. 045, two-tailed.
214 RUBIO-FERNA
´NDEZ AND GLUCKSBERG
(e.g., the word RIGHT appeared on the right-hand side). In con-
trast, in the experimental condition the location of the words was
switched (e.g., the word RIGHT appeared on the left-hand side). In
this second condition, participants had to overcome the impulse to
respond according to the location of the word rather than to the
word’s meaning.
5
The task consisted of 50 trials: 10 practice trials and 40 critical
trials. All practice trials were in the baseline condition and were
not analyzed. Of the 40 critical trials, 20 corresponded with the
baseline condition and 20 with the experimental condition. The
words appeared in black capital letters (in 54-point Arial font)
against a white background on a 15-in. screen. In between trials,
the screen remained blank for 600 ms, and then a blue cross
appeared in the center of the screen as a fixation point for 1,000
ms. A pseudorandom sequence was generated to present the trials
so that the same response would not occur in more than two
consecutive trials. One monolingual participant was removed from
the data set because of her high error rate (25% of responses; 45%
in the critical condition).
Results. As in previous studies, bilingual participants showed
less interference in the experimental condition relative to the
baseline condition than did monolinguals (see Figure 5). A 2 2
analysis of variance revealed a significant main effect of condition,
F(1, 43) 48.68, p.001. The Condition Group interaction
was also significant, F(1, 43) 4.70, p.037, reflecting the
superior performance of the bilingual participants in the executive
control task. Performance on the baseline condition was compa-
rable for the two groups.
6
Correlation Between the Sally–Anne Task
and the Simon Task
For the correlation between the two tasks, we computed fixation
duration on the wrong container in the FB condition of the Sally–
Anne task. That is, for how long participants fixated on the wrong
container from the point when the containers reappeared on the
screen at the end of the FB question until they responded to the
question. This measure therefore includes first and later fixations.
One bilingual participant was eliminated from the analysis because
of calibration problems that affected this measure, and one mono-
lingual participant who did not make any eye movements during
the processing of the FB question was eliminated. Fixation dura-
tion on the wrong container did not reveal a reliable difference
between bilinguals (M206 ms) and monolinguals (M262
ms), t(42) 0.961, p.342.
We took fixation duration on the wrong container of the FB
condition as a measure of egocentric bias, and as such we expected
it to positively correlate with participants’ level of executive
control. That is, the larger the fixation duration on the wrong
container in the FB condition of the Sally–Anne task, the larger the
difference between the experimental and the baseline conditions in
the Simon task. We calculated the participants’ level of executive
control as the difference between their RTs in the baseline and the
experimental conditions (M
bilinguals
26 ms; M
monolinguals
49
ms). The correlation between the Sally–Anne task and the Simon
task was indeed significant for bilinguals, r(20) .513, one-tailed
p.008, and for monolinguals, r(19) .529, one-tailed p.008.
Of the 43 participants who were included in the correlation anal-
ysis, 12 (seven bilinguals and five monolinguals) did not fixate at
all on the wrong container while processing the FB question.
Without these 12 participants (for whom fixation duration was 0
ms), the correlation between the Sally–Anne task and the Simon
task was still significant for bilinguals, r(13) .761, one-tailed
p.001, and for monolinguals, r(14) .491, one-tailed p.028.
Discussion
Our overall results show that adults suffer from an egocentric
bias in FB reasoning. Unlike in the case of young children,
however, this bias does not affect task performance: Adults always
answer the FB question correctly. However, with the use of an
eye-tracking technique, we observed that the majority of adults
momentarily consider the egocentric response before correcting
this tendency and taking the perspective of the story character.
These results are in line with previous studies revealing an ego-
centric bias in several different areas of cognition (Birch & Bloom,
2007; Camerer et al., 1989; Keysar, 1994; Keysar et al., 2003).
5
The version of the Simon task that we used also has elements of the
Stroop task, given the conflict between word meaning and word position.
We are grateful to Helen Bialystok for pointing out to us that both types of
task have shown bilingual advantages.
6
The comparison between Asian collectivistic and non-Asian individu-
alistic participants in the Simon task did not reveal a reliable difference
between the two groups.
1000
1200
1400
1600
1800
2000
Bilingual
0
200
400
600
800
FB TB
Response time (ms)
Monolingual
0
Figure 4. Mean response times (standard error of the means) to the
false-belief (FB) question and the true-belief (TB) question.
350
400
450
500
550
BASELINE EXPERIMENTAL
Response time (ms)
Bilingual
Monolingual
**
Figure 5. Mean response times (standard error of the means) in the
baseline and experimental conditions of the Simon Task.
p.002,
two-tailed, for paired comparisons between conditions in the two groups.
215
BILINGUAL ADVANTAGE IN FALSE-BELIEF REASONING
Regarding differences between bilinguals and monolinguals, we
found that adult bilinguals suffer less from the curse of knowledge
than do monolinguals. This advantage in FB reasoning may be
maintained from an early age, because bilingual children outper-
form monolinguals in FB tasks (Goetz, 2003; Kova´cs, 2009). One
of the reasons for this advantage may be the bilinguals’ higher
level of executive control, which was confirmed in the present
study with the Simon task. Moreover, performance in the execu-
tive control task correlated with performance on the Sally–Anne
task. An enhanced executive control would help bilingual partic-
ipants inhibit their own knowledge of the situation in FB tasks,
making it easier to take the perspective of the story character
(Kova´cs, 2009).
A second factor that may account for the bilinguals’ advantage
in FB reasoning is their early sociolinguistic awareness of their
interlocutors’ language background (Comeau, Genesee, & Men-
delson, 2007; Genesee et al., 1996). Culture, for example, has been
found to have an effect on adult perspective-taking abilities in
referential communication tasks, with people from collectivistic
cultures suffering less interference from their own visual perspec-
tive than do people from individualistic cultures (Wu & Keysar,
2007). If the interdependence that is characteristic of collectivistic
cultures can make Chinese university students better at
perspective-taking tasks than American students, having to mon-
itor for the language background of their interlocutors from an
early age might also make bilinguals better perspective takers than
monolinguals.
Future research should determine whether the advantage in FB
reasoning that we have observed in adult bilinguals relative to
monolinguals is maintained throughout development from early
childhood (Goetz, 2003; Kova´cs, 2009). Bilinguals’ advantage in
executive control tasks has indeed been found in children, young
adults, and older adults (Bialystok et al., 2004; Carlson & Melt-
zoff, 2008; Costa et al., 2008). This advantage could in principle
help bilinguals maintain an advantage in FB reasoning during
development. Moreover, a recent study has shown that the
perspective-taking abilities used in referential communication
tasks continue to develop into late adolescence in monolinguals
(Dumontheil, Apperly, & Blakemore, 2010). It remains an empir-
ical question whether the perspective-taking advantage that bilin-
gual children have shown in language-switch situations, for exam-
ple (Comeau et al., 2007; Kova´cs, 2009), would also be maintained
throughout development and perhaps enhance their FB reasoning
abilities throughout the life span.
Overall, our results support previous research suggesting that
bilingualism is one of those life experiences that leads to general
cognitive effects (Bialystok, 2009; Bialystok & Craik, 2010).
Although these effects have been mixed in other areas of cogni-
tion, the effect of bilingualism on FB reasoning is a positive one.
References
Baron-Cohen, S., Leslie, A. M., & Frith, U. (1985). Does the autistic child
have a “theory of mind”? Cognition, 21, 37–46. doi:10.1016/0010-
0277(85)90022-8
Bialystok, E. (2009). Bilingualism: The good, the bad and the indifferent.
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 12, 3–11. doi:10.1017/
S1366728908003477
Bialystok, E., & Craik, F. I. M. (2010). Cognitive and linguistic processing
in the bilingual mind. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 19,
19–23. doi:10.1177/0963721409358571
Bialystok, E., Craik, F. I. M., Klein, R., & Viswanathan, M. (2004).
Bilingualism, aging, and cognitive control: Evidence from the Simon
task. Psychology and Aging, 19, 290–303. doi:10.1037/0882-
7974.19.2.290
Birch, S. A. J., & Bloom, P. (2007). The curse of knowledge in reasoning
about false beliefs. Psychological Science, 18, 382–386. doi:10.1111/
j.1467-9280.2007.01909.x
Camerer, C., Lowenstein, G., & Weber, M. (1989). The curse of knowl-
edge in economic settings: An experimental analysis. Journal of Polit-
ical Economy, 97, 1232–1254. doi:10.1086/261651
Carlson, S. M., & Meltzoff, A. N. (2008). Bilingual experience and
executive functioning in young children. Developmental Science, 11,
282–298. doi:10.1111/j.1467-7687.2008.00675.x
Comeau, L., Genesee, F., & Mendelson, M. (2007). Bilingual children’s
repairs of breakdowns in communication. Journal of Child Language,
34, 159–174. doi:10.1017/S0305000906007690
Costa, A., Herna´ndez, M., & Sebastia´n-Galle´s, N. (2008). Bilingualism
aids conflict resolution: Evidence from the ANT task. Cognition, 106,
5986. doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2006.12.013
Costa, A., & Santesteban, M. (2004). Lexical access in bilingual speech
production: Evidence from language switching in highly proficient bi-
linguals and L2 learners. Journal of Memory and Language, 50, 491–
511. doi:10.1016/j.jml.2004.02.002
Desmet, T., & Duyck, W. (2007). Bilingual language processing. Lan-
guage and Linguistics Compass, 1, 168–194. doi:10.1111/j.1749-818X
.2007.00008.x
Dumontheil, I., Apperly, I., & Blakemore, S. J. (2010). Online usage of
theory of mind continues to develop in late adolescence. Developmental
Science, 13, 331–338. doi:10.1111/j.1467-7687.2009.00888.x
Dussias, P. E. (2004). Parsing a first language like a second: The
erosion of L1 parsing strategies in Spanish-English bilinguals. Inter-
national Journal of Bilingualism, 8, 355–371. doi:10.1177/
13670069040080031001
Dussias, P. E., & Sagarra, N. (2007). The effect of exposure on syntactic
parsing in Spanish-English bilinguals. Bilingualism: Language and Cog-
nition, 10, 101–116. doi:10.1017/S1366728906002847
Epley, N., Morewedge, C. K., & Keysar, B. (2004). Perspective taking in
children and adults: Equivalent egocentrism but differential correction.
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 40, 760–768. doi:10.1016/
j.jesp.2004.02.002
Genesee, F., Boivin, I., & Nicoladis, E. (1996). Talking with strangers: A
study of bilingual children’s communicative competence. Applied Psy-
cholinguistics, 17, 427–442. doi:10.1017/S0142716400008183
Genesee, F., Nicoladis, E., & Paradis, J. (1995). Language differentiation
in early bilingual development. Journal of Child Language, 22, 611–
631. doi:10.1017/S0305000900009971
Goetz, P. (2003). The effects of bilingualism on theory of mind develop-
ment. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 6, 1–15. doi:10.1017/
S1366728903001007
Green, C. S., & Bavelier, D. (2003, May 29). Action video game modifies
visual selective attention. Nature, 423, 534–537. doi:10.1038/
nature01647
Gullberg, M., & Indefrey, P. (2003). Language Background Question-
naire: The dynamics of multilingual processing. Nijmegen, the Nether-
lands: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics.
Kaushanskaya, M., & Marian, V. (2007). Bilingual language processing
and interference in bilinguals: Evidence from eye tracking and picture
naming. Language Learning, 57, 119–163. doi:10.1111/j.1467-
9922.2007.00401.x
Kelley, C. M., & Jacoby, L. L. (1996). Adult egocentrism: Subjective
experience versus analytic bases for judgment. Journal of Memory and
Language, 35, 157–175. doi:10.1006/jmla.1996.0009
216 RUBIO-FERNA
´NDEZ AND GLUCKSBERG
Keysar, B. (1994). The illusory transparency of intention: Linguistic per-
spective taking in text. Cognitive Psychology, 26, 165–208. doi:10.1006/
cogp.1994.1006
Keysar, B., Barr, D. J., Balin, J. A., & Brauner, J. S. (2000). Taking
perspective in conversation: The role of mutual knowledge in compre-
hension. Psychological Science, 11, 32–38. doi:10.1111/1467-
9280.00211
Keysar, B., Lin, S., & Barr, D. J. (2003). Limits on theory of mind use in
adults. Cognition, 89, 25–41. doi:10.1016/S0010-0277(03)00064-7
Kova´cs, A. M. (2009). Early bilingualism enhances mechanisms of false-
belief reasoning. Developmental Science, 12, 48–54. doi:10.1111/
j.1467-7687.2008.00742.x
Kova´cs, A. M., & Mehler, J. (2009). Cognitive gains in 7-month-old
bilingual infants. PNAS Proceedings of the National Academy of Sci-
ences of the United States of America, 106, 65566560. doi:10.1073/
pnas.0811323106
Maguire, E. A., Spiers, H. J., Good, C. D., Hartley, T., Frackowiak, R. S.,
& Burgess, N. (2003). Navigation expertise and the human hippocam-
pus: A structural brain imaging analysis. Hippocampus, 13, 250–259.
doi:10.1002/hipo.10087
O’Leary, M. J., & Barber, P. J. (1993). Interference effects in the Stroop
and Simon paradigms. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human
Perception and Performance, 19, 830844. doi:10.1037/0096-
1523.19.4.830
Oller, D. K., & Eilers, R. E. (2002). Language and literacy in bilingual
children. Clevedon, England: Multilingual Matters.
Onishi, K. H., & Baillargeon, R. (2005, April 8). Do 15-month-old infants
understand false beliefs? Science, 308, 255–258. doi:10.1126/
science.1107621
Perner, J., & Lang, B. (1999). Development of theory of mind and exec-
utive control. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 3, 337–344. doi:10.1016/
S1364-6613(99)01362-5
Polk, T. A., & Farah, M. J. (1998). The neural development and organi-
zation of letter recognition: Evidence from functional neuroimaging,
computational modelling, and behavioural studies. PNAS Proceedings of
the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 95,
847–852. doi:10.1073/pnas.95.3.847
Pyers, J. E., & Senghas, A. (2009). Language promotes false-belief under-
standing: Evidence from learners of a new sign language. Psychological
Science, 20, 805–812. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9280.2009.02377.x
Southgate, V., Senju, A., & Csibra, G. (2007). Action anticipation through
attribution of false belief by 2-year-olds. Psychological Science, 18,
587–592. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9280.2007.01944.x
Valenzuela, M. J., & Sachdev, P. (2006). Brain reserve and dementia: A
systematic review. Psychological Medicine, 36, 441–454. doi:10.1017/
S0033291705006264
Wellman, H. M., Cross, D., & Watson, J. (2001). Meta-analysis of theory-
of-mind development: The truth about false belief. Child Development,
72, 655–684. doi:10.1111/1467-8624.00304
Wimmer, H., & Perner, J. (1983). Beliefs about beliefs: Representation and
constraining function of wrong beliefs in young children’s understand-
ing of deception. Cognition, 13, 103–128. doi:10.1016/0010-
0277(83)90004-5
Wu, S., & Keysar, B. (2007). Cultural effects on perspective taking.
Psychological Science, 18, 600606. doi:10.1111/j.1467-
9280.2007.01946.x
Received July 16, 2010
Revision received July 1, 2011
Accepted July 5, 2011
217
BILINGUAL ADVANTAGE IN FALSE-BELIEF REASONING
... Rather, there is evidence that bilingual children may have an advantage over their monolingual counterparts in many cognitive skills, such as episodic and semantic memory (Kormi-Nouri et al., 2008), working memory (Morales et al., 2013), spatial reasoning (Greenberg et al., 2013), inhibitory control (Mehrani & Zabihi, 2017), executive functioning (Bialystok, 2015;Morales et al., 2013), and attention (Yang et al., 2011). Further, there is evidence to suggest that bilingual children perform better than monolinguals on ToM tasks (Goetz, 2003;Rubio-Fernández & Glucksberg, 2012;Schroeder, 2018). This bilingual advantage in mentalizing has also been found in adults (Tiv et al., 2020(Tiv et al., , 2021, suggesting that bilingualism may have long- term 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 benefits for an individual's cognitive development. ...
... The present study therefore aimed to test this by going beyond broad concepts of culture, such as country, to explore the impact of specific environmental factors, which vary between countries but also between individuals within a country. As in previous studies (e.g., Goetz, 2003;Rubio-Fernández & Glucksberg, 2012;Schroeder, 2018), our findings revealed that bilingual children outperformed their monolingual counterparts on the ToM battery when language ability and age was controlled for. Multiple explanations have been proposed for this bilingual advantage in mentalizing. ...
... However, even if one would not generally assume a cognitive advantage in the narrow sense, there is evidence to suggest cognitive advantages of multilingualism with respect to mental abilities in a broader sense (Nicoladis, 2016). Studies suggest, for instance, advantages in divergent thinking in problem-solving (Fürst & Grin, 2018;Kharkhurin, 2009;Leikin, 2012;Leikin et al., 2020;Sampedro & Peña, 2019) as well as mental flexibility (i.e., the ability to learn and change behaviour or goals; Dewaele & Botes, 2020;Greve et al., 2021), social flexibility (Ikizer & Ramírez-Esparza, 2018), situational awareness and sensitivity (Contemori & Tortajada, 2020;Yow & Markman, 2011a, 2011b, perspective taking (Fan et al., 2015), theory of mind (Kovács, 2009;Navarro & Conway, 2021;Rubio-Fernández & Glucksberg, 2012), and self-concepts (Fan et al., 2015;Festman & Schwieter, 2019). ...
... Additionally, other cognitive abilities might mediate the effect as they are potentially affected by multilingualism (2a) and potentially influence emotional competence (2b). A promising alternative cognitive mediator could be theory of mind, which seems to be positively related to multilingualism (Kovács, 2009;Navarro & Conway, 2021;Rubio-Fernández & Glucksberg, 2012) and to emotional competence (Ferguson & Austin, 2010;Qualter et al., 2011). ...
Article
Full-text available
The goal of the current paper is to investigate effects of multilingualism regarding emotional competence (EC). We argue that there might be two paths of influence that connect multilingualism and EC. First, we assume that multilingualism represents a linguistically and culturally heterogeneous context that may stimulate the development of EC. Second, cognitions, such as executive control or divergent thinking, might be an important condition for or constituent of emotions. Since cognitive abilities are sometimes assumed to be positively influenced by multilingualism (called the cognitive resp. bilingual advantage hypothesis), multilingualism might affect EC by boosting these cognitive functions. In an initial pre-study (N = 85) we found that two EC subcomponents were significantly predicted by degree of multilingualism (DM). In a second study (N = 989), we found that DM significantly predicted EC directly and was mediated by cultural heterogeneity but not by language switching, executive functions, or divergent thinking.
... An explanation for the association between multilingualism and improved perspective-taking skills can be attributed to differences in sociopragmatic abilities between monolingual and multilingual individuals. Because multilinguals need to be aware of whether or not they share one of both of their languages with others, they may have had more opportunities to practice taking on other's perspective (Kov acs, 2009;Rubio-Fern andez & Glucksberg, 2012). This heightened sociopragmatic awareness enables multilingual children to effectively navigate social interactions, interpret communicative cues, and comprehend others' perspectives. ...
Article
Full-text available
Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is associated with marked heterogeneity in executive function (EF) abilities. EF components including inhibition and shifting are related to ASD core symptoms such as perspective taking, social communication, and repetitive behavior. Recent research suggests that multilingualism may have a beneficial impact on EF abilities, especially in children with ASD. However, there remains a lack of comprehensive understanding regarding the relationships between multilingualism, EF, and core symptoms in children with ASD. Here, we examined these associations in 7–12‐year‐old children with and without ASD ( N = 116; 53 ASD, Mean age = 9.94 years). Results suggest that multilingual children have stronger parent‐reported inhibition, shifting, and perspective‐taking skills than monolingual children. Furthermore, we found a significant interaction between diagnosis and multilingual status on inhibition, such that the effects of multilingualism were stronger for children with ASD than typically developing (TD) children. Finally, we found indirect effects of multilingualism on perspective taking, social communication, and repetitive behaviors mediated by EF skills. These results demonstrate the supportive influences multilingual experience might have on bolstering EF and reducing ASD‐related symptoms.
... Empirical studies have shown that adult bilinguals exhibited greater mentalizing abilities compared to monolinguals [5], owing to bilinguals' enhanced executive functions, greater metalinguistic awareness [6], and strengthened social-pragmatic flexibility [7]. However, bilinguals also vary in meaningful and consequential ways within group and greater bilingual experience may promote pragmatic awareness and attention to social information, two core components of mentalizing [4]. ...
Article
Full-text available
This study investigates the mentalizing performances of Tibetan-Chinese-English trilinguals with different L2 proficiency, using the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test accuracy as a measurement index. The results indicated that trilinguals proficient in both Tibetan and Chinese outperformed those proficient in Tibetan and relatively proficient in Chinese in mentalizing abilities. A survey on language background revealed a positive correlation between L2 proficiency and L2 usage frequency. For Tibetan-Chinese-English trilinguals, Chinese proficiency and usage frequency may have significant effects on their development of mentalizing abilities and involvement in social interaction.
Article
Aims and Objectives Although there exists empirical support for the idea that bilingualism is associated with improved social cognition, the presence and the structure of this link remains inconclusive. There is currently a need to clarify the specific contexts in which these benefits may tend to emerge. Methodology We sought to advance the field of bilingualism by examining the link between bilingualism and a specific form of social cognition, theory of mind. We measured theory of mind processing in a sample of adult bilinguals and monolinguals and measured patterns of decision-making using several different methods; task performance (accuracy and reaction time), implicit decision-making patterns (mouse-tracking), and self-report. We collected mouse-tracking data during two different tasks (false belief and cognitive–affective theory of mind) and self-report was measured using the perspective-taking (PT) subscale of the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI). Data and Analysis For each behavioral task, we compared reaction time, accuracy, and both mouse-tracking metrics between language groups. For self-report, we compared PT scores between language groups. We also tested for interactive effects of gender and language group on each dependent variable. Findings Across all participants, bilingualism was not associated with any statistically significant improvements in theory of mind. However, we did observe that gender interacted with language group to affect maximal deviation values (mouse-tracking) during the false belief task and self-reported PT scores. Bilingualism tended to confer some improvements in self-reported theory of mind (PT subscale of IRI) in men, but not women. Originality It is currently unknown if bilingualism is associated with improved theory of mind processing when measured using several different types of tasks and using mouse-tracking. Significance/Implications These findings contribute to a growing body of evidence elucidating the complex relationship that exists between multiple language acquisition and social cognition.
Article
Full-text available
Increased metalinguistic awareness (MLA) has been associated with improved performance in tasks of theory of mind; researchers have proposed that individuals with increased MLA, such as bilinguals, rely on metalinguistic skills when completing tasks that require taking other people’s perspective into account compared to other individuals who mostly rely on general executive control to complete the same tasks. MLA would, therefore, act as a less effortful path to understanding other perspectives, especially when they differ from one’s own. However, the evidence underlying this claim is scant and largely limited to children’s theoretical frameworks. In this study, we investigated whether individual differences in MLA predict perspective-taking Theory of Mind above and beyond inhibitory control in a sample of diverse adults across a wide range of linguistic, socioeconomic, and cognitive factors. Bootstrapped mediation analyses revealed that inhibitory control partially, but not fully, mediated the relationship between MLA and perspective-taking. In addition, when differences in language, education and culture were controlled for, the effects of both MLA and inhibitory control were reduced. Overall, the findings emphasize the need to consider multivariate approaches towards understanding the mechanisms underlying theory of mind.
Chapter
People differ in irony comprehension. Studies reported that ironic meanings may both be processed faster and slower than literal ones. Although numerous hypotheses were tested, the inconsistent findings remain unexplained. It may be that people process irony with different efficiency because they differ in cognitive capacities, inferential skills, and communication-related social experiences. I argue to revise assumptions and reframe conceptualizations of irony set up between the delayed and direct access and examine irony from a novel perspective. So far, irony explorations have been anchored in the monolingual model of communication. Yet, monolingualism is no longer the communicative norm. The shift to bilingualism produces a new default language user: the bilingual. This shift is relevant for irony exploration: bilinguals exhibit different sets of socio-cognitive skills and communicative experiences than monolinguals. This provides an opportunity to look at irony from a new—bilingual—perspective and examine what it tells us about the process of irony comprehension.
Article
Full-text available
Lifelong bilingualism may result in neural reserve against decline not only in the general cognitive domain, but also in social cognitive functioning. In this study, we show the brain structural correlates that are associated with second language age of acquisition (L2AoA) and theory of mind (the ability to reason about mental states) in normal aging. Participants were bilingual adults (46 young, 50 older) who completed a theory-of-mind task battery, a language background questionnaire, and an anatomical MRI scan to obtain cortical morphometric features (i.e., gray matter volume, thickness, and surface area). Findings indicated a theory-of-mind decline in older adults compared to young adults, controlling for education and general cognition. Importantly, earlier L2AoA and better theory-of-mind performance were associated with larger volume, higher thickness, and larger surface area in the bilateral temporal, medial temporal, superior parietal, and prefrontal brain regions. These regions are likely to be involved in mental representations, language, and cognitive control. The morphometric association with L2AoA in young and older adults were comparable, but its association with theory of mind was stronger in older adults than young adults. The results demonstrate that early bilingual acquisition may provide protective benefits to intact theory-of-mind abilities against normal age-related declines.
Article
Egocentrism is a hallmark of human mentalizing endeavours. People frequently use their own minds as a point of departure when generating inferences about the minds of others. Although this starting point is rarely the end point, self-referential information often persists in biasing social inferences. In this Review, we describe models that can account for egocentric mentalizing in adults. We then identify factors that amplify and attenuate egocentrism in reasoning about the content of other minds. Specifically, we consider features of mentalizing targets that determine the extent to which they are socially proximal versus distant and, therefore, the extent to which they activate self-information; features of mentalizers that influence their ability or motivation to override an egocentric default; and features that can be deliberately modified to attenuate egocentrism during mentalizing. Finally, we conclude with several open questions that point to promising directions for future research in this area.
Article
Full-text available
The article reports research investigating the way bilingualism affects cognitive and linguistic performance across the life span. In general, bilingualism appears to have both benefits and costs. Regarding costs, bilinguals typically have lower formal language proficiency than monolinguals do; for example, they have smaller vocabularies and weaker access to lexical items. The benefits, however, are that bilinguals exhibit enhanced executive control in nonverbal tasks requiring conflict resolution, such as the Stroop and Simon tasks. These patterns and their consequences are illustrated and discussed. We also propose some suggestions regarding underlying mechanisms for these effects.
Article
Full-text available
An important component of the communicative competence of proficient bilinguals is the ability to use each of their languages differentially and appropriately according to relevant characteristics of the interlocutors and communicative situations. The research reported here examined the communicative competence of four young children (average age of 2;2, average MLU of 1·56) who were acquiring English and French simultaneously in the home. We observed the ways these children used their languages with monolingual strangers and with their bilingual parents. Specifically, the children's use of English-only, French-only, and mixed (English and French) utterances with the strangers during naturalistic play situations was compared with patterns of use with their parents, also during play sessions. We found that all of the children made some accommodations that could be linked to the monolingualism of the stranger; some of the children were more accommodating than others. The results are discussed in terms of young bilingual children's ability to modify their language on-line in response to the particular language characteristics of their interlocutors.
Article
Full-text available
This research examines whether an individual's linguistic knowledge, either as a speaker of a particular language or as a bilingual, influences theory of mind development. Three- and four-year-old English monolinguals, Mandarin Chinese monolinguals, and Mandarin-English bilinguals were given appearance-reality, level 2 perspective-taking, and false-belief tasks. All children were tested twice, a week apart; the bilinguals were tested in each of their languages. The 4-year-olds in each group performed significantly better than the corresponding 3-year-olds. Both monolingual groups performed similarly on the tasks, and the bilinguals performed significantly better than the monolingual groups, although when the two testing times were examined separately, they had only a near-significant tendency to perform better at the second testing time. Possible explanations for this evidence of a bilingual advantage are greater inhibitory control, greater metalinguistic understanding, and a greater sensitivity to sociolinguistic interactions with interlocutors.
Article
Full-text available
An eye tracking experiment examined how exposure to a second language (L2) influences sentence parsing in the first language. Forty-four monolingual Spanish speakers, 24 proficient SpanishEnglish bilinguals with extensive L2 immersion experience read temporarily ambiguous constructions. The ambiguity concerned whether a relative clause (RC) that appeared after a complex noun phrase (NP) was interpreted as modifying the first or the second noun in the complex NP (Elpolicíaarrestóalahermanadelcriadoqueestabaenfermadesdehacíatiempo). The results showed that whereas the Spanish monolingual speakers and the SpanishEnglish bilingual with extensive exposure attached the relative to the second noun. Results are discussed in terms of models of sentence parsing most consistent with the findings.
Article
This book sets a high standard for rigor and scientific approach to the study of bilingualism and provides new insights regarding the critical issues of theory and practice, including the interdependence of linguistic knowledge in bilinguals, the role of socioeconomic status, the effect of different language usage patterns in the home, and the role of schooling by single-language immersion as opposed to systematic training in both home and target languages. The rich landscape of outcomes reported in the volume will provide a frame for interpretation and understanding of effects of bilingualism for years to come.
Article
The influence of memory on the subjective experience of later problem solving was investigated in two experiments. Study of the solution words to anagrams in the first phase of the experiments lead to faster solution of those anagrams in a second phase. Participants interpreted their easy solution of old anagrams as due to characteristics of the anagrams and judged them as easier for others to solve, relative to new anagrams. When participants were deprived of the subjective experience of solving the anagrams by presenting the solution with the anagram, they switched to an alternative basis for judgment such as a theory or rules, which lead to a different ordering of items according to judged difficulty (Experiment 1). Requiring participants to recognize whether solution words had been presented in the first phase did not eliminate the effect of prior presentation on judged difficulty, but requiring recognition judgments and warning participants of the nature of the effect did eliminate it (Experiment 2). We discuss the usefulness of the distinction between judgments based on subjective experience versus theory, introduce ways to diagnose when different bases for judgments are used, and discuss how memory spoils subjective experience as a basis for judgment.
Article
The present paper summarizes research showing that bilingualism affects linguistic and cognitive performance across the lifespan. The effect on linguistic performance is generally seen as a deficit in which bilingual children control a smaller vocabulary than their monolingual peers and bilingual adults perform more poorly on rapid lexical retrieval tasks. The effect on cognitive performance is to enhance executive functioning and to protect against the decline of executive control in aging. These effects interact to produce a complex pattern regarding the effect of bilingualism on memory performance. Memory tasks based primarily on verbal recall are performed more poorly by bilinguals but memory tasks based primarily on executive control are performed better by bilinguals. Speculations regarding the mechanism responsible for these effects are described.
Article
Past research suggests that parsing processes in a bilingual's first language (L1) can undergo changes as a function of exposure to a second language (L2). Evidence for this claim comes from studies that have examined how Spanish-English bilinguals resolve temporarily ambiguous sentences containing a complex noun phrase followed by a relative clause, as is the case in “Peter fell in love with the daughter of the psychologist who studied in California.” Previous studies indicate that whereas monolingual Spanish speakers attach the relative clause to the first noun in the complex noun phrase (non-local attachment), monolingual English speakers interpret the relative clause locally (i.e., attach the relative clause to the noun immediately preceding it). With respect to bilinguals, recent research with Spanish-English bilinguals and professional translators (e.g., Dussias 2001, 2003; Parede, 2004) have shown that bilinguals attach the relative clause to the second noun in the complex noun phrase, when reading in Spanish, their first language. The differences observed between monolingual and bilingual speakers have been attributed to experience in a second language immersion environment. For example, Dussias (2003) argues that extensive exposure to a preponderance of English constructions resolved in favor of local attachment can render this interpretation more available, resulting in the low attachment preference observed in Spanish-English bilinguals. Of interest in the present paper is to assess whether speakers with fewer years of immersion experience in the L2 environment than those reported in previous studies employ the correct strategy in each of their languages. To this end, eye-movement data was collected while proficient L1 Spanish/L2 English speakers read ambiguous sentences of the type described above, in their first language, and their performance was compared to a monolingual Spanish group. Analyses revealed that the L1 Spanish speakers of English favored local over non-local attachment when reading in their first languages. The results are most congruent with exposure-based or parallel interactive models of sentence parsing as postulated by Brysbaert & Mitchell (1996), Mitchell & Cuetos (1991) and Mitchell, Cuetos, Corley & Brysbaert (1995), given the assumption within these models that frequency-based exposure affects parsing decisions. Address for correspondence
Article
Recognition and interference of a nontarget language (Russian) during production in a target language (English) were tested in Russian-English bilinguals using eye movements and picture naming. In Experiment 1, Russian words drew more eye movements and delayed English naming to a greater extent than control nonwords and English translation equivalents. In Experiment 2, Russian words spelled using English-specific letters drew more eye movements than control nonwords and English translation equivalents; however, both Russian words and nonword controls delayed English naming. Results of the two experiments suggest that nontarget-language information is processed during a target-language task. Recognition and production in bilinguals might function within distinct constraints, with recognition sensitive to lexical information (target and nontarget) and production sensitive to phonological information (lexical and nonlexical).
Article
Research on theory of mind increasingly encompasses apparently contradictory findings. In particular, in initial studies, older preschoolers consistently passed false-belief tasks — a so-called “definitive” test of mental-state understanding — whereas younger children systematically erred. More recent studies, however, have found evidence of false-belief understanding in 3-year-olds or have demonstrated conditions that improve children's performance. A meta-analysis was conducted (N= 178 separate studies) to address the empirical inconsistencies and theoretical controversies. When organized into a systematic set of factors that vary across studies, false-belief results cluster systematically with the exception of only a few outliers. A combined model that included age, country of origin, and four task factors (e.g., whether the task objects were transformed in order to deceive the protagonist or not) yielded a multiple R of .74 and an R2 of .55; thus, the model accounts for 55% of the variance in false-belief performance. Moreover, false-belief performance showed a consistent developmental pattern, even across various countries and various task manipulations: preschoolers went from below-chance performance to above-chance performance. The findings are inconsistent with early competence proposals that claim that developmental changes are due to tasks artifacts, and thus disappear in simpler, revised false-belief tasks; and are, instead, consistent with theoretical accounts that propose that understanding of belief, and, relatedly, understanding of mind, exhibit genuine conceptual change in the preschool years.