The project explores interaction between linguistic experience and metacognition. Metacognition is an ability to evaluate one’s own decisions. It has two components: monitoring (evaluation of cognitive performance) and control (regulation of cognition). Monitoring is aimed to track past decisions; control processes guide future behavior, considering one’s estimation of past decisions and available evidence about the current environment, including social environment. These components are served by different cognitive processes, yet share some neural networks.
Many earlier studies showed the effect of linguistic experience on non-verbal behavior, including evaluation of whether information is true or false, moral judgments, categorization of sensory input, heuristic biases in decision-making. Yet we do not know how linguistic experience affects decision-making. The link between language and behavior is thought to be mediated by cognition. The interaction between language and language structures has been well described but the relations between language cognition and behavior remain a black box. I suggested that the link between language cognition and behavior is not direct. Language does not affect behaviour directly. Different language structures do not result in behavioural and decisional outcomes. Using suffixes to express plurality (car – carS) or prefixes (iyikwayiwa – WIRRiyikwayiwa, meaning “child – children” in the Anindilyakwa language) will not change the way people make decisions. Knowledge of multiple languages per se does not lead to different behaviours either. Rather, the link between language cognition and behavior is metacognition, i.e. evaluations of one’s own cognitive processes and performance. Tracking one’s performance in language one and in language two, the need to switch processing strategies when using different languages, the need to monitor who says what to whom in which language and why in multilingual societies – all these factors train metacognitive monitoring, which, in turn, potentially changes the monitoring control processes.
The ERC project has 3 parts:
First, I will run a hypothesis-driven study to test the main hypothesis in Europe, and then I will generalize the results over other cultures and geographical areas, to make sure that the results are not linked to European populations with specific demographic and social environments. I will explore the same phenomena in in Europe and in Mesoamerica, with different native languages of participants (Mayan, Catalan, Basque, Mexican Spanish, Castilian Spanish, German, Dutch, Turkish). Also, I will verify that the modulatory effect of bilingualism on metacognition is not a laboratory artefact and is sufficiently robust to survive when the study is set outside laboratory conditions.
Second, I will explore if the effect of metacognition is transferred across domains and tasks, or limited to the domain, in which metacognition is trained.
Third, I will experimentally modulate metacognition in language tasks to explore if such interventions will change non-verbal decisions (shift exploration-exploitation bias, affect how much one relies on stereotypes in decision-making; inferential reasoning, etc).
