The neuro-cognitive and behavioral interplay between linguistic awareness, metacognitive efficiency, and decision-making strategies

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, 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. We aim to reveal the social engineering "tricks" – how social attitudes and behaviours can be orchestrated in pre-planned directions via language manipulation. We will develop strategies to make individual decisions resilient to such manipulations by engaging general mechanisms of metacognition and metalinguistic awareness.