Projekt

Multiple studies showed the effect of language on cognition, behaviour and decision-making. The project team believes that the proximate mechanism for this effect is metacognition. The need to monitor different cognitive mechanisms engaged by diverse language structures affects metacognition, which, in turn, influences non-verbal behaviour and decisions in non-language domains. Importantly, experience with multiple languages may influence metalinguistic awareness, which is closely linked to grammaticality (the individual ability to test whether an utterance can be generated by internalized grammar) and acceptability (judgment of whether an expression is correct or wrong, which is affected not only by grammaticality, but also by socio-cultural factors). Metalinguistic awareness can influence the attitude to speakers of other languages, immigrants and non-native speakers, speakers of minority languages, speakers of regional accents and dialects, and through that modulate tolerance to different lifestyles, values and ideas. The proposed project will contribute to an explanation of why people in different communities make different decisions even if they have the same information. The aim is to reveal the social engineering "tricks" - how social attitudes and behaviours can be orchestrated in pre-planned directions via language manipulation. Strategies to make individual decisions resilient to such manipulations by engaging general mechanisms of metacognition and metalinguistic awareness will be developed.

• Prof. Dr. Nils Langer

  Universität Flensburg
  Fakultät II
  Institut für Frisistik und Minderheitenforschung
  Flensburg
  

• Dr. Mikhail Ordin

  Universidade de Coimbra
  Coimbra Institute for Biomedical Imaging and
  Translational Research
  Coimbra
  Portugal
  

• Dr. Leona Polyanskaya

  Universidade de Coimbra
  Department of Psychology and Education
  Coimbra
  Portugal