The core set of research topics at Neurolinguistics, Multilingualism and Cognition (Neuromultico) revolves around the bilingual mind. Our questions are based on the coexistence of multiple languages in the brain and the implications of this coexistence for cognitive capacities beyond language. We also investigate different issues associated with lexical and conceptual processes. For instance, we study how the brain represents different types of words (e.g., nouns vs verbs) and how it mediates the knowledge we have about the world (e.g., knowing that a lion is a carnivore that roars and has a mane and a tail). Additionally, we are constantly eager to expand our horizons by exploring issues that are not directly associated with our main research topics (e.g., questions on musical processing or executive control). We address our questions from a cognitive psychological perspective (with neurologically intact and brain-damaged individuals), but we also examine the relationship between the brain, language and cognition.

1. Bilingualism, intuition and reasoning

If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his own language, that goes to his heart.

—Nelson Mandela

Would you kill one person to save five? Even if it were for the greater good, many people would find the action of killing someone incompatible with their morality… UNLESS… they face this dilemma in a foreign language. Difficult as it may be to believe, it has been consistently found that most of us tend to make more utilitarian decisions when using a foreign language. In addition, this “foreign language effect” seems to go beyond moral choices. For instance, using a foreign language reduces risk aversion in decision-making contexts, with the risks appearing smaller. However, how could our choices depend on whether we make them in our native tongue or a foreign language? It has been proposed that a foreign language increases the psychological distance with certain contents. However, the answer to this question remains unclear. In fact, the neurocognitive mechanisms behind this phenomenon remain largely unexplored. Unraveling the origin of the foreign language effect could open multiple possibilities in applied fields such as neuroeconomics, psychotherapy, and social psychology.

2. On the collateral effects of speaking more than one language

I cannot communicare con you; Oggi I cannot say il mio nome to you; I’m a disastro today.

—Patient AH (in Abutalebi et al. 2000. Neurocase, 6(1):56-56).

Cases of bilingual patients who lost the capacity to prevent the interference of one language in the other provided the earliest opportunities to study the neurocognitive mechanisms of bilingual language control (bLC). These bLC mechanisms partially overlap with domain-general cognitive control mechanisms, that is, with other mechanisms that we use in non-linguistic situations needing control (e.g., when we need to focus on a particular activity while avoiding distractions). Many researchers have proposed that the constant need for bilinguals to apply bLC could result in them being overtrained (compared to monolinguals) in domain-general cognitive control. In fact, a considerable number of studies have shown that bilinguals outperform monolinguals in certain non-linguistic capacities requiring control. Moreover, it seems that this bilingual advantage has a protective effect against the earliest symptoms of dementia. Bilinguals succumb to the neural damage caused by dementia about four years later than monolinguals. However, several questions remain. For instance, does this protective effect extend to language? That is, is the first language of a bilingual more resistant to decline than the language of a monolingual?

3. What is special about verbs?

I got into my head that I was like a sentence without a verb, incapable of taking action, amorphous. Verbs are worked-up little military leaders. They are the ones that call words to arms, that lead sentences to the battle.

—Vassilis Alexakis, “Foreign Words” (2006 by Autumn Hill Books, p. 85)

This reflection beautifully captures the fundamental role of verbs in sentences: binding different arguments together, understanding arguments as the participants required by the verb. For instance, it is the verb “love” that binds the arguments “Alice” and “her little brother” into “Alice loves her little brother”. This binding operation, which is at the base of syntax processing and precedes sentence comprehension, requires retrieving information about verb argument structure, such as how many and the type of arguments a verb requires (e.g., “love” requires a complement and, hence, a transitive syntactic frame). A hotly debated question has been whether and to what extent sentence comprehension deficits in aphasia are (at least in part) driven by difficulties in retrieving verb argument structure. Another question is whether the processing costs of verbs vary in function of their argument structure (e.g., whether transitive verbs are costlier to process than intransitive verbs due to their more complex argument structure). Besides being relevant at a theoretical level, answering these questions may set the basis for addressing further questions related to verbal fluency in the language therapy for aphasia or foreign language learning.

4. Collaborators