Abstract
AbstractBilingual children have better Theory-of-Mind compared to monolingual children, but comparatively little research has examined whether this advantage in social cognitive ability also applies to adults. The current study investigated whether multilingual status and/or number of known languages predicts performance on a mentalizing task in a large sample of adult participants. Multilingualism was decomposed based on whether English is the first language or not. All analyses controlled for well-known predictors of mentalizing, such as gender, same-race bias, and years of English fluency. We found a U-shaped trend, such that monolinguals and multilinguals did not differ much in their mentalizing ability, but bilinguals performed worse than monolinguals. Our study builds upon past work by examining a large sample of participants, measuring a crucial aspect of adult social cognition that has previously been unexplored, controlling for several nuisance variables, and investigating whether multilingualism leads to additional benefits in mentalizing abilities beyond bilingualism.
Publisher
Cambridge University Press (CUP)
Subject
Linguistics and Language,Language and Linguistics,Education