The moral foreign language effect (MFLE) describes how people’s decisions may change when a moral dilemma is presented in either their native (NL) or foreign language (FL). Growing attention is being directed to unpacking what aspects of bilingualism may influence the MFLE, though with mixed or inconclusive results. The current study aims to bridge this gap by adopting a conceptualization of bilingualism that frames this construct as a composite and continuous measure. In a between-group analysis, we asked 196 Italian–English bilinguals to perform a moral dilemmas task in either their NL (i.e., Italian) or FL (i.e., English). In a within-group analysis, we evaluated the effects of FL age of acquisition, FL proficiency, and language dominance – all measured as continuous variables – on moral decision-making. Overall, findings indicate that differences within bilinguals’ language experience impact moral decisions in an FL. However, the effect of the linguistic factors considered was not ubiquitous across dilemmas, and not always emerged into a MFLE. In light of these results, our study addresses the importance of treating bilingualism as multidimensional, rather than a unitary variable. It also discusses the need to reconceptualize the FLE and its implications on moral decision-making.

The aim of this study was to examine the role of attention in understanding linguistic information even in a noisy environment. To assess the role of attention, we varied task instructions in two experiments in which participants were instructed to listen to short sentences and thereafter to type in the last word they heard or to type in the whole sentence. We were interested in how these task instructions influence the interplay between top-down prediction and bottom-up perceptual processes during language comprehension. Therefore, we created sentences that varied in the degree of predictability (low, medium, and high) as well as in the degree of speech degradation (four, six, and eight noise-vocoding channels). Results indicated better word recognition for highly predictable sentences for moderate, though not for high, levels of speech degradation, but only when attention was directed to the whole sentence. This underlines the important role of attention in language comprehension.

The present study focuses on individual differences in the ability to recover from an initial misinterpretation during the processing of garden path (GP) sentences with local syntactic ambiguity. The performance of reanalysis in GP sentences is a cognitive task that requires efficient use of executive functions and allocation of working memory resources. In this study, we explored the possible role of the neurotransmitter dopamine, which has long been implicated in cognitive control processes, in the successful performance of reanalysis. We examined whether participants’ ability to successfully reanalyze a sentence with local ambiguity can be predicted based on (1) their tonic dopamine levels, as reflected by their resting state spontaneous eye-blink rate, measured prior to the experiment; and (2) their reading time patterns in the critical region of the sentence. We ran a self-paced reading experiment in Hebrew, assessing reanalysis performance via a paraphrasing task. We observed a linear and polynomial effect of eye-blink rate on reanalysis performance, with medium rates, corresponding to medium dopamine levels, associated with best performance. We also observed an effect of reading times, with longer reading times in the critical region predicting better reanalysis performance.

Considering the paucity of research done on the reported speech of L2 speakers compared with the body of work based on native speakers, particularly in the domain of education, this study investigates ‘polyphony’ (the dialogic nature of discourse) in the indirect reports of Iranian English as Foreign Language (EFL) learners in light of Bakhtin’s concept of ‘double-voiced discourse’ (DVD) (Bakhtin, 1984; Zbikowski, 2002). The goal of the article was to characterise the types of reporting attested in L2 data in the language-learning classroom and to analyse instances of discord between speakers’ voices to better understand what gives rise to these differences in an additional language. To achieve this, we observed naturally occurring interactions between Iranian EFL learners to see how they change the original speech in their indirect reports via the use of semantic and syntactic transformations. The findings revealed traces of distorted reported speech that not only refute the monophonic nature of indirect reports among the interactants but also emphasise the representational characteristics of DVD in its different forms. Samesaying and distorted reported speech are closely examined in accord with the nature of an L2 produced in a language-learning classroom. This article contributes to interlanguage pragmatics, with a focus on sociopragmatic variations that delve into intersubjectivity in language interaction in an institutional context.

The ability to reconstruct a missing event to create a coherent interpretation – bridging inference – is central to understanding both real-world events and visual narratives like comics. Most previous work on visual narrative inferencing has focused on fully omitted events, yet few have compared inference generation when climactic events become replaced with a panel employing numerous inferential techniques (e.g., action stars or onomatopoeia). These techniques implicitly express the unseen event while balancing several underlying features that describe their informativeness. Here, we examine whether processing and inference resolution differ across inferential techniques in two self-paced reading experiments. Experiment 1 directly compared five distinct types, and Experiment 2 explored the effect of combining techniques. In both experiments, differences in processing arise both between inferential techniques themselves, and at subsequent panels allowing the bridging inference to be resolved. Analysis of inferential features suggested that the explicitness of the inferential technique led to greater demand in processing, which later facilitated inference generation and comprehensibility. The findings reinforce the necessity of discussing the diversity of narrative patterns motivating bridging inferences within visual narratives.

Across sign languages, nouns can be derived from verbs through morphophonological changes in movement by (1) movement reduplication and size reduction or (2) size reduction alone. We asked whether these cross-linguistic similarities arise from cognitive biases in how humans construe objects and actions. We tested nonsigners’ sensitivity to differences in noun–verb pairs in American Sign Language (ASL) by asking MTurk workers to match images of actions and objects to videos of ASL noun–verb pairs. Experiment 1a’s match-to-sample paradigm revealed that nonsigners interpreted all signs, regardless of lexical class, as actions. The remaining experiments used a forced-matching procedure to avoid this bias. Counter our predictions, nonsigners associated reduplicated movement with actions not objects (inversing the sign language pattern) and exhibited a minimal bias to associate large movements with actions (as found in sign languages). Whether signs had pantomimic iconicity did not alter nonsigners’ judgments. We speculate that the morphophonological distinctions in noun–verb pairs observed in sign languages did not emerge as a result of cognitive biases, but rather as a result of the linguistic pressures of a growing lexicon and the use of space for verbal morphology. Such pressures may override an initial bias to map reduplicated movement to actions, but nevertheless reflect new iconic mappings shaped by linguistic and cognitive experiences.

The world’s languages draw on different reference frames to encode spatial relationships between people, objects or places. We address how subtle differences in reference frame preferences across Spanish and English affect Spanish–English bilinguals’ interpretations of spatial descriptions involving the terms left and right. Bilinguals saw an entity (‘object’; e.g., a vase or a human) with a circle on either side, along with a description of the location of a ball relative to the object (e.g., The ball is to the right of the vase or The ball is on the vase’s right). Their task was to decide which circle indicated the ball’s location. Results showed that syntax and object type contributed differently to bilinguals’ responses: Effects of syntax patterned with Spanish preferences, whereas effects of object type patterned with English preferences. English language exposure subtly affected bilinguals’ response choices. Results are discussed with respect to experience-based theories of language processing.

The past couple of decades have seen a substantial increase in linguistic research that highlights the non-arbitrariness of language, as manifested in motivated sound–meaning correspondences. Yet one of the challenges of such studies is that there is a relative paucity of data-driven analyses, especially in the case of languages other than English, such as Hungarian, even though the proportion of at least partially motivated words in Hungarian vocabulary is substantial. We address this gap by investigating the relationship between Hungarian phoneme classes and positive/negative sentiment based on 3,023 word forms retrieved from the Hungarian Sentiment Lexicon. Our results indicate that positive polarity word forms tend to contain more vowels, front vowels, continuants, fricatives, palatals, and sibilants. On the other hand, negative sentiment polarity words tend to have more rounded vowels, plosives, and dorsal consonants. While our analysis provides strong evidence for a set of non-arbitrary form–meaning relationships, effect sizes also reveal that such associations tend to be fairly weak tendencies, and therefore sentiment polarity cannot be derived from the relative frequencies of phoneme classes in a deterministic fashion.