Bilingual Logic

 Monolinguists (people who speak only one language) often give different answers to the same question, depending on how the problem (say, responding to a pestilence) is framed. Frame a choice one way,--e.g., as lives saved--you get one answer. Frame it differently —as lives lost--you get a different response. That’s not terribly surprising, but now look at bilinguists  (people who speak two languages). Pose the choices in their dominant language and the frame matters, but if they hear the question in their second language, the framing bias goes out the w indow. Now they answer the question the same way, not matter how it is framed.A finding that people are more logical and consistent when they are using a second language is truly surprising, and full of implications. Does tbis mean that scholars whose mother tongue is not English are more rational in response to academic papers written in English than are native English speakers? When Donald Trump frames a choice as a loss, does he make people who only speak English afraid while listeners whose first language is Spanish see through the frame to the speech ’s lack of logic? Many religious thinkers pursue their questions using a second language like Latin or Hebrew; does that  remove emotion from their thinking? Would groups make better decisions if they ran their meetings in a foreign language?Ai, yai yai. How topsy turvey can the world get?These questions come up in a new book,The Bilingual Brain by Albert Costa. Sad...
Source: Babel's Dawn - Category: Speech-Language Pathology Authors: Source Type: blogs