Abstract
Title of talk: Reading-To-Think: How We Generate Social or Other Inferences In A First And Second Language
Language use is inherently social (reviewed in Titone & Tiv, 2023, Bilingualism: Language & Cognition). Thus, most of us reason and make social decisions every day based on what we read in a first or second language (also known as theory of mind, mentalizing, perspective taking, etc.). Major research areas within the cognitive and neural sciences separately illuminate the cognitive mechanisms of reading (e.g., decoding words, sentences, and discourse) and thinking (e.g., inferencing, reasoning, decision making). In this talk, I will discuss new eye-tracking work from my lab that addresses how multilingual adults read-to-think in their first and second language, as it pertains to multisentence texts that require logical, mentalizing, or ironic inferences. As part of this, I will also explore how individual differences in social language use, as reflected by language entropy (e.g., Gullifer & Titone, 2020, Bilingualism: Language & Cognition), modulate eye-movement reading patterns.
Bio
Debra Titone is a Full Professor of Psychology, and Canada Research Chair in Language and Multilingualism at McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada (https://www.mcgill.ca/language-lab/). She currently directs the Montreal Bilingualism Initiative (https://www.mcgill.ca/mobi/), is co-founder of Women in Cognitive Science Canada+ (https://wicsc.ca/), and serves as Editor of the Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology (CJEP; https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/cep).
Debra Titone will also join us for lunch in the MultiLing break room across the hall from room 421, at 12:00. Please bring your lunch and join us!
This event is open for everyone, no registration needed. You can also join the event on Zoom, by clicking here.