In a bilingual state of mind: Investigating the continuous relationship between bilingual language experience and mentalizing

Abstract

Mentalizing, a dynamic form of social cognition, is strengthened by language experience. Past research has found that bilingual children and adults outperform monolinguals on mentalizing tasks. However, bilingual experiences are multidimensional and diverse, and it is unclear how continuous individual differences in bilingual language experience relate to mentalizing. Here, we examine whether individual differences in bilingual language diversity, measured through language entropy, continuously pattern with mentalizing judgments among bilingual adults, and whether this relationship is constrained by first vs. second language reading. We tested sixty-one bilingual adults on a reading and inference task that compared mental state and logical inferences. We found that greater language diversity patterned with higher mentalizing judgments of mental state inferences across all readers, and that L2 readers attributed more mentalizing to logical inferences compared to L1 readers. Together, we found evidence of a positive relationship between continuous individual differences in bilingual language diversity and mentalizing.

Bridging people and perspectives: General and language-specific social network structure predict mentalizing across diverse sociolinguistic contexts.

“…Prior to data analysis, we undertook a series of predetermined preprocessing steps from Tiv, O’Regan, and Titone (2021). These steps yielded the removal of three out of 138 total full item sets (resulting in 135 analyzed items), one full participant from Gainesville (due to incomplete data), and single trials that were slower than 10 s. Details regarding these steps and their justification can be read in .…”

“…We used the inference reading and rating task from Tiv, O’Regan, and Titone (2021) to assess individual differences in mentalizing. In this task, participants read and rated 138 English sentence-pair item sets, in three inference type conditions: mental state, logical, and incoherent (see Table 2 for examples).…”

“…To honor the social ubiquity of mentalizing via written language and account for subtle linguistic aspects of mentalizing, we developed a set of sentence pairs that rely on mental state or logical inferences in order to understand why a character behaves a certain way (Tiv, O’Regan, & Titone, 2021). We dissociated these items on linguistic coherence (i.e., a general way for a behavior to follow a context) and mentalizing (i.e., a specific way for a behavior to follow a context based on hidden mental states).…”

“…This enhanced social flexibility (Ikizer & Ramírez-Esparza, 2018) was evidenced by Fan et al (2015) who found that both bilingual and monolingual children situated in a bilingual environment performed better on a mentalizing task than monolingual children who were only exposed to one language (replicated with babies in Liberman et al, 2017). A growing body of work has also shown that personal experiences in bilingualism enhance mentalizing skills across the lifespan (Goetz, 2003; Navarro & Conway, 2021; Rubio-Fernández & Glucksberg, 2012; Schroeder, 2018; Sundaray et al, 2018; Tiv, O’Regan, & Titone, 2021). As mentioned, Tiv, O’Regan, and Titone (2021) tested adult bilinguals in Montréal on a novel mentalizing reading and rating task, finding that bilinguals with greater personal language diversity were more accurate at mentalizing, whereas linguistic coherence was unaffected.…”

Bridging interpersonal and ecological dynamics of cognition through a systems framework of bilingualism.

“…This offers a unique and concrete opportunity to operationalize and quantitatively characterize such socioecological dynamics on cognition that may otherwise seem amorphous. Our ongoing work extends this theoretical framework to other aspects of cognition, including language attitudes (Feng et al, 2021), implicit bias (Kutlu et al, 2021a, 2021b), and cognitive perspective-taking or mentalizing (Tiv et al, 2021).…”