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Lecture by Dr. Constantinos Hadjichristidis on “The foreign language effect on judgment and decision making”

2020年09月27日 16:57 Rendong Cai 点击:[]

On September 24th, 2020, Dr. Constantinos Hadjichristidis from the University of Trento was invited to give a talk entitled “The foreign language effect on judgment and decision making”. This talk was given on Zoom and was hosted by the Bilingual Cognition and Development Lab and the Research Center for Linguistics and Applied Linguistics.

Dr. Constantinos Hadjichristidis first introduced the dual process route of risk and benefit perception, with the hypothesis that foreign language overall promotes more positive affect. He suggested this impact was worth investigating against the background of a growing group of multilingual learners in today’s closely connected world. Using a series of experiments, he illustrated the impact of foreign language use on people’s attitude towards consumption behavior, such as bilinguals’ willingness to consume recycled water, artificial meat, and insect-based food. The result indicated that people would be more willing to accept the challenge when reading slogans in foreign languages, which promoted more positive emotions and would trigger less disgust than the native counterparts. Another series of experiments in which they compared bilinguals’ reactions to good-luck and bad-luck scenarios revealed that foreign language use can help bilinguals suppress their superstitious thoughts. One possible underlying mechanism for the foreign language effect found in these experiments was language-dependent memory.

The audience were deeply impressed by the studies of Dr. Hadjichristidis, especially the applied nature of his findings. The talk inspired discussion about future studies and further potential application of the foreign language effect.



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