Susanne Brouwer

This study investigated whether using a foreign language affects aesthetic judgments of art. Across three experiments (N=345), Polish-English and Dutch-English bilinguals rated songs and paintings on profoundness, liking, recommendation, and familiarity. Participants completed the study in either their native or foreign language, allowing us to examine the Foreign Language Effect on judgments of both language-rich content (songs with lyrics) and language-poor content (paintings). Contrary to theoretical predictions based on reduced emotional engagement and impaired metacognition in foreign languages, presentation language did not significantly affect any ratings. Instead, two factors consistently predicted profoundness judgments: familiarity and medium. Participants rated familiar artworks as more profound regardless of language condition, and music received higher profoundness ratings than paintings across all experiments. These findings suggest that aesthetic perception is primarily driven by prior exposure and medium-specific characteristics rather than the language in which art is encountered, challenging assumptions about linguistic effects on aesthetic judgments.

Previous research finds that vocal emotions are recognized above chance, with higher accuracy typically observed for one’s own cultural group – an “in-group” advantage. However, this may not apply uniformly, especially for bilinguals who are highly proficient in a second language (L2) but not members of the L2 cultural in-group. This study investigates Dutch-English bilinguals’ recognition of anger, fear, happiness, sadness and neutral emotion in Dutch (first language; L1), English (second language; L2) and two unfamiliar languages, Arabic and Hindi, using pseudo-utterances. Listeners were highly accurate in recognizing emotions in both Dutch and English. Recognition in Arabic matched their known languages, while Hindi was lower. Additionally, accuracy in English emotion recognition was positively correlated with English proficiency. These results suggest that the in-group advantage can extend to a highly proficient L2, indicating that cultural membership is not strictly necessary for highly accurate vocal emotion recognition.

This study investigated whether social distance conveyed through the communicative context modulated the Foreign-Language Effect in moral decision-making. Dutch–English bilinguals responded to personal moral dilemmas in Dutch or English, presented in written form (Experiment 1) or spoken form (Experiment 2). In Experiment 3, personal and impersonal dilemmas were presented. Across experiments, a narrator, designed to appear socially close or distant, was introduced midway through the experiments. Contrary to the predictions, no reliable Foreign-Language Effect was observed in any experiment, nor did narrator-based social distance or dilemma type affect moral decisions. These null effects suggest that subtle manipulations of social distance, particularly when conveyed by artificial or unfamiliar narrators, are insufficient to alter moral decisions. These findings establish important boundary conditions for social distance accounts of the Foreign-Language Effect and indicate that stronger emotional engagement or clearer in-group cues may be necessary for language-related shifts in moral decision-making to emerge.

Previous research has consistently supported the Foreign Language Effect (FLE), indicating that bilinguals show reduced emotional reactivity when processing emotional stimuli in their second (L2) compared to their native (L1) language. While the FLE has been extensively investigated in bilingual populations, considerably less is known about emotional language processing in multilingual speakers and whether reduced emotional resonance extends to a third language (L3). The present event-related potential study examined emotional language processing in Polish–English–Dutch (L1–L2–L3) multilinguals by employing an affective priming paradigm and a valence judgment task. Negative and neutral facial expressions were presented as primes, followed by negative and neutral target words in participants’ respective languages. Results revealed a robust valence effect in both early and late processing stages, with larger EPN and LPC responses together with smaller N400 responses for negative relative to neutral words. Crucially, emotional modulation of the EPN and N400 remained stable across languages, whereas the LPC revealed a graded reduction in emotional modulation from L1 to L2 and L3. Specifically, negative words elicited enhanced LPC amplitudes in L1, a weaker emotional modulation in L2, and no reliable valence effect in L3. Altogether, these novel findings suggest that the FLE in multilingual speakers manifests itself primarily as reduced emotional engagement during later evaluative stages of emotional language processing rather than as diminished access to emotional meaning during earlier processing stages.

This study investigated whether using a foreign language affects aesthetic judgments of art. Across three experiments ( N = 345), Polish–English and Dutch–English bilinguals rated songs and paintings on profoundness, liking, recommendation, and familiarity. Participants completed the study in either their native or foreign language, allowing us to examine the Foreign Language Effect on judgments of both language‐rich content (songs with lyrics) and language‐poor content (paintings). Contrary to theoretical predictions based on reduced emotional engagement and impaired metacognition in foreign languages, presentation language did not significantly affect any ratings. Instead, two factors consistently predicted profoundness judgments: familiarity and medium. Participants rated familiar artworks as more profound regardless of language condition, and music received higher profoundness ratings than paintings across all experiments. These findings suggest that aesthetic perception is primarily driven by prior exposure and medium‐specific characteristics rather than the language in which art is encountered, challenging assumptions about linguistic effects on aesthetic judgments.

The aim of this study is to investigate whether individuals can use background music as a facilitative cue for sentence recognition by testing if the music

People's judgements differ systematically while reading moral dilemmas in their native or their foreign language. This so-called Foreign Language Effect (FLE) has been found in many language pairs when tested with artificial, sacrificial moral dilemmas (i.e., Trolley and Footbridge). In Experiment 1, we investigated whether the FLE can be replicated in Turkish (native) – English (foreign) bilinguals using the same dilemmas (N = 203). These unrealistic and decontextualized dilemmas have been criticized for providing low external validity. Therefore, in Experiment 2, we (1) tested bilinguals with realistic scenarios which included the protagonist's age as a source of identity (child, adult, neutral), and (2) investigated the FLE in these scenarios (N = 467). Our results revealed that the FLE was not present in Turkish–English bilinguals, tested either on sacrificial dilemmas or realistic scenarios. Psychological distance of the scenarios, protagonists’ age and the perceived age similarity with the protagonist affected moral judgments.

The current study investigated the contribution of multiple verbal and working memory (WM) skills to morphosyntactic prediction in Turkish-speaking 4- to 8-year-old children. In a visual world eye-tracking experiment, 76 children were presented with verb-final sentences with nominative and accusative case markers on the initial noun (e.g., the fast rabbit_nominative … the carrot_accusativeeat_future vs. the fast rabbit_accusative … the fox_nominativeeat_future) while they were looking at a visual display with three objects (e.g., rabbit, carrot, and fox). Importantly, the case markers on the initial noun could be used to predict the second noun in these sentences. The results revealed that when children’s early productive vocabulary and language production skills were higher, the better and faster they were in predicting the upcoming noun. The episodic buffer, a component of WM, was also positively associated with children’s morphosyntactic prediction abilities. The implications of these results for the mechanisms of linguistic prediction are discussed.

This study examined whether song lyrics and their semantic meaning interfere with speech intelligibility. In three experiments, a total of 108 native Dutch participants listened to Dutch target sentences in the presence of three versions of the pop songs Last Friday Night (T.G.I.F.) (Experiment 1) or Hot N Cold (Experiment 2a and 2b) by singer Katy Perry at different signal-to-noise ratios. The versions consisted of the original English songs, the karaoke versions of the songs without lyrics, and anomalous versions of the songs in the fictional language Simlish, which was created for the video game The Sims. The songs were played in chronological (Experiments 1 and 2a) or in random order (Experiment 2b). Participants' task was to type the target sentence they had heard. In all experiments, speech intelligibility was better in nonlyrical (karaoke) than lyrical music (English and Simlish). In addition, listeners performed better in lyrics without semantic meaning (Simlish) than with semantic meaning (English). Finally, speech intelligibility was better when the song in the background was played in chronological rather than in random order. These findings aid in understanding the mechanisms involved during speech-in-music intelligibility. Public Significance Statement This study suggests that the presence of song lyrics and their meaning in the background negatively impact speech intelligibility. Additionally, hearing background music in its natural, chronological as opposed to a random order is beneficial for speech intelligibility.