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      Thinking in a Non-native Language: A New Nudge?

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          Abstract

          The majority of research on learning a non-native language has focused on the personal benefits of being bilingual or multilingual. In this paper, we focus on the potential positive effect of actively thinking in a non-native language. Our approach is inspired by recent experimental research suggesting that actively thinking in a non-native language leads to improved reasoning and decision-making, which is known as the foreign-language effect (FLE). We examine the possibility that one could choose to think in a non-native language in order to reap these potential benefits. Integrating this research with research in positive psychology, we explain how doing so might be understood as a type of “nudge,” or intervention that one could use to increase their chances of making autonomous decisions reflecting their own best interest. Nudges have been associated with improved outcomes with respect to many aspects of our lives – for instance sticking to goals, saving money, exercising more frequently, maintaining a healthy diet. It may be that bilinguals can assume an active role in increasing their happiness or well-being by making better decisions through strategic implementation of a non-native language in decision-making contexts. We also discuss the ethics of using the FLE as a nudge when it has beneficial consequences, as there are instances when doing so could be beneficial with respect to public policy as well. For instance, it has been shown that people are less averse to sustainable farming and eating practices (e.g., eating insects) when actively thinking in a non-native language. After reviewing the current research on the FLE, we suggest that further research needs to be done because actively thinking in a non-native language seems to function beneficially in some circumstances but may pose cognitive disadvantages in others.

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          Bilingual advantages in executive functioning either do not exist or are restricted to very specific and undetermined circumstances.

          The hypothesis that managing two languages enhances general executive functioning is examined. More than 80% of the tests for bilingual advantages conducted after 2011 yield null results and those resulting in significant bilingual advantages tend to have small sample sizes. Some published studies reporting significant bilingual advantages arguably produce no group differences if more appropriate tests of the critical interaction or more appropriate baselines are used. Some positive findings are likely to have been caused by failures to match on demographic factors and others have yielded significant differences only with a questionable use of the analysis-of-covariance to "control" for these factors. Although direct replications are under-utilized, when they are, the results of seminal studies cannot be reproduced. Furthermore, most studies testing for bilingual advantages use measures and tasks that do not have demonstrated convergent validity and any significant differences in performance may reflect task-specific mechanism and not domain-free executive functions (EF) abilities. Brain imaging studies have made only a modest contribution to evaluating the bilingual-advantage hypothesis, principally because the neural differences do not align with the behavioral differences and also because the neural measures are often ambiguous with respect to whether greater magnitudes should cause increases or decreases in performance. The cumulative effect of confirmation biases and common research practices has either created a belief in a phenomenon that does not exist or has inflated the frequency and effect size of a genuine phenomenon that is likely to emerge only infrequently and in restricted and undetermined circumstances.
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            Putting the ‘app’ in Happiness: A Randomised Controlled Trial of a Smartphone-Based Mindfulness Intervention to Enhance Wellbeing

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              The Inhibitory Advantage in Bilingual Children Revisited

              In recent decades several authors have suggested that bilinguals exhibit enhanced cognitive control as compared to monolinguals and some proposals suggest that this main difference between monolinguals and bilinguals is related to bilinguals’ enhanced capacity of inhibiting irrelevant information. This has led to the proposal of the so-called bilingual advantage in inhibitory skills. However, recent studies have cast some doubt on the locus and generality of the alleged bilingual advantage in inhibitory skills. In the current study we investigated inhibitory skills in a large sample of 252 monolingual and 252 bilingual children who were carefully matched on a large number of indices. We tested their performance in a verbal Stroop task and in a nonverbal version of the same task (the number size-congruency task). Results were unequivocal and showed that bilingual and monolingual participants performed equally in these two tasks across all the indices or markers of inhibitory skills explored. Furthermore, the lack of differences between monolingual and bilingual children extended to all the age ranges tested and was not modulated by any of the independent factors investigated. In light of these results, we conclude that bilingual children do not exhibit any specific advantage in simple inhibitory tasks as compared to monolinguals.
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                Author and article information

                Contributors
                Journal
                Front Psychol
                Front Psychol
                Front. Psychol.
                Frontiers in Psychology
                Frontiers Media S.A.
                1664-1078
                03 September 2020
                2020
                : 11
                : 549083
                Affiliations
                [1] 1Department of Philosophy, University of Minnesota at Morris , Morris, MN, United States
                [2] 2Department of Philosophy and Religion, Broward College , Fort Lauderdale, FL, United States
                [3] 3Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, Villanova University , Villanova, PA, United States
                Author notes

                Edited by: Xinjie Chen, Stanford University, United States

                Reviewed by: Mehrgol Tiv, McGill University, Canada; Honggang Liu, Northeast Normal University, China

                *Correspondence: Steven McFarlane, stevenpmcfarlane@ 123456gmail.com

                This article was submitted to Language Sciences, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychology

                Article
                10.3389/fpsyg.2020.549083
                7494810
                56e8b550-00a1-4f11-940d-1751427173e8
                Copyright © 2020 McFarlane, Cipolletti Perez and Weissglass.

                This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

                History
                : 04 April 2020
                : 13 August 2020
                Page count
                Figures: 0, Tables: 0, Equations: 0, References: 66, Pages: 10, Words: 0
                Categories
                Psychology
                Conceptual Analysis

                Clinical Psychology & Psychiatry
                foreign-language effect,fle,bilingualism,decision-making,nudge
                Clinical Psychology & Psychiatry
                foreign-language effect, fle, bilingualism, decision-making, nudge

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