The Foreign Language Effect In Bilinguals' Cultural Information Processing

Along with the increased internationalization,how bilinguals process cultural information in two language modes has attracted great attention in cross-cultural research.As bilinguals need to switch between two different languages,whether native and foreign languages affect foreign language learners' processing of cultural information deserves further investigation.Thus,the current study explores how the native and foreign language influence Chinese English learners' processing of different types of cultural information through an empirical research paradigm.With a self-designed sentence reading task,the current study compared Chinese English learners' processing of different types of cultural information across the native and the foreign language.The cultural information was divided into two types: the information containing native culture related factors and the general cultural information which has nothing to do with the Chinese culture.Participants' Reaction Time(RT)and accuracy in reading the critical words at the end of the sentences were recorded as the index of information processing.Repeated measures analysis of variance on RT showed that in native language,participants responded to native culturerelated information more quickly than culture-unrelated information.Meanwhile,factually false information was responded more quickly than factually true information,However,these difference in RT disappeared in foreign language.ANOVA on accuracy data showed that while participants' accuracy was identical across different types of information in native Chinese and the overall accuracy of the participants decreased in English and the participants' accuracy in rating factually false information significantly lower than factually true information.These results indicate that foreign language effect exists in cultural information processing,the possible reasons are as follows:(1)In the native language,the participants tend to rely more on the intuition processing,which leads to more responses in Chinese.Moreover,the participants are more likely be more emotional activated when they are dealing with information involved their own culture than the culture irrelevant information in the native language,which further enhances their intuition processing.Therefore,the participants are able to response to such information more rapidly.(2)While in the foreign language,the cognitive load of the participants increases.Consequently,their reaction time increases in the foreign language and accuracy decreases as well.Besides,the difference of reaction time across culture related information and unrelated information showing in the native language disappears.It also indicates that,bilinguals are more susceptible to “good enough” representations when processing cultural information as the cognitive load increases,which makes it easier for them to misjudge information that contains world knowledge violations in foreign languages.