The impact of linguistic experience on metacognition, metalinguistic awareness, decision-making strategies and social tolerance

Living beings – including humans – have to make decisions and evaluate their efficiency, in order to adapt their behavior accordingly. This requires evaluating own cognitive processes and states, the available evidence, and the degree of uncertainty associated with decisions. The ability to make such evaluations is called metacognition. It follows from the above, that metacognition has two important components: knowledge about cognition and regulation of cognition, and consequently regulation of optimal behavior. These components are served by different cognitive processes, referring to metacognitive monitoring and metacognitive control. Monitoring processes are aimed to track decisions, cognitive states and behavior in uncertainty situations and estimating retrospective confidence associated with cognitive states and past decisions. Control processes are engaged in guiding future behavior, considering one’s current cognitive states and available evidence about the current environment and past outcomes. Metacognitive ability in a particular domain can be trained via experience. We suggest that typologically different languages require different cognitive processing strategies, which need to be monitored. As the neural networks underlying meta-monitoring and meta-control are partially overlapping, enhanced meta-monitoring may change meta-control and influence behavior. This model is still to be verified.

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 only by a range of socio-cultural – education, economic well-being, cultural values in the society – and demographic – age, gender, urban/rural residence, etc. – factors, as well as by personality traits and current psychological state (mood and affect, level of alertness, etc). Metalinguistic awareness can influence attitude to speakers of other languages, immigrant speakers of national language, regional accents and dialects, and through that modulate tolerance to "otherness", i.e., different lifestyles, values, ideas.

The project will show if metacognitive enhancement in language tasks is transferred to non-linguistic behavior and decision-making strategies. That can explain why people in different linguistic populations sometimes come to different conclusions and make different decisions even if they have the same information. In contemporary society, where multilingualism is a norm rather than exception, it is important to be aware to what extent metacognitive enhancement due to individual linguistic experience is transferred to non-language behavior and influences decision making both at individual and group levels.