A Study Of The Influence Of Different Languages On Chinese-English Bilinguals' Social Norm Processing

With the deepening of international communication,how the social norms of different cultures are processed cognitively in intercultural communication has attracted a lot of attention.Bilinguals need to switch between two languages constantly,and how language mode may affect the cognitive processing of these social norms is still unclear.Thus,the present study compared unskilled Chinese-English bilinguals' acceptance level of different types of social norms in their Chinese and English respectively in a self-designed cognitive psychological experiment.It explores how unskilled ChineseEnglish bilinguals' two languages affect their social norm processing.Specifically,we ask the following two questions:1)What differences could be observed in the processing of three different types of social behaviors across bilinguals' two languages,namely,behaviors highly conforming to social norms,behaviors highly violating social norms and neutral behaviors that are generally acceptable?2)What are possible cognitive mechanisms that generate the above effects?To address these questions,this study tested 54 unskilled Chinese-English bilinguals with a Social Norm Acceptance Evaluation(SNAE)task.The subjects' basic information was collected,including age,language level and other background factors through the questionnaire.E-Prime software was used for the programming SNAE task and the collection of behavioral data.SPSS software was used for data analysis to compare the subjects' reaction time and acceptance level to each type of social norm in the two language modes.Results showed that,compared with the native language mode,unskilled ChineseEnglish bilinguals' acceptance level of behaviors highly conforming to social norms reduced significantly,while their acceptance level of behaviors highly violating social norms increased in foreign language mode.Meanwhile,their acceptance level of neutral behaviors that are generally acceptable was unchanged.This result is in line with the literature by supporting the reduced L2 emotional reaction hypothesis,i.e.,both positive and negative emotions were weakened while bilinguals switched from their native language to foreign language,thus,emotional responses to foreign cultural information would be reduced.Therefore,in foreign language mode,the subjects in the present experiment avoided the emotional extreme rating of the behaviors that are highly conforming to or highly violating social norms while the rating of neutral behaviors that are generally acceptable remained stable.The present results provide new insight into our understanding about cross-cultural communication and second language acquisition by revealing the modulation mechanism of language mode on the processing of social norm information processing.