Purpose: People are shaped holistically by dynamic and interrelated individual and social-ecological systems. This perspective has been discussed in the context of varied aspects of bilingual experiences, namely language acquisition and development. Here, we applied a to language attitudes, which may be especially responsive to social-ecological influences.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDiverse bilingual experiences have implications for language comprehension, including pragmatic elements such as verbal irony. Irony comprehension is shaped by an interplay of linguistic, cognitive, and social factors, including individual differences in bilingual experience. We examined the relationship between individual differences related to bilingualism, specifically, the capacity to understand others' mental states and ambient exposure to language diversity, on irony comprehension.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMentalizing, or reasoning about others' mental states, is a dynamic social cognitive process that aids in communication and navigating complex social interactions. We examined whether exposure to diverse perspectives, afforded by occupying influential social network positions, predicted bilingual adults' performances on a behavioral mentalizing rating task in regions of high and low linguistic diversity. We calculated the degree to which respondents' social network position generally bridged unconnected others (i.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFHuman cognition occurs within social contexts, and nowhere is this more evident than language behavior. Regularly using multiple languages is a globally ubiquitous individual experience that is shaped by social environmental forces, ranging from interpersonal interactions to ambient language exposure. Here, we develop a , where embedded layers of individual, interpersonal, and ecological sociolinguistic factors jointly predict people's language behavior.
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