Recent research by doctoral students Samantha Fan and Zoe Liberman in collaboration with Dr. Boaz Keysar and Dr. Katherine Kinzler investigated the impact of exposure to a diverse linguistic environment on early social communication. Much of Dr. Keysar’s work focuses on the difficulty of communication: people tend to be egocentric and overconfident in their communicative abilities. Here, the research team asked whether being regularly exposed to multiple languages influences communicative development.

Their findings, published in Psychological Science, show that children raised in a multilingual social environment have extensive practice with linguistic perspective-taking: they must track who speaks each language, and who can understand which content. These social experiences may lead to enhanced communication. Thus, children raised in monolingual and multilingual environments were tested on a social communication task that required taking an experimenter’s visual perspective in order to interpret her intended meaning. Monolingual children failed to take the speaker’s perspective dramatically more often than children who were exposed to a multilingual environment. Children who were merely exposed regularly to a second language, but only spoke English themselves, performed as well as bilingual children, despite having lower executive-function scores. Thus, this research suggests that communicative advantages do not require speaking multiple languages, and are likely social in origin, rather than due to cognitive differences. For millennia, multilingual exposure has been the norm. This study shows that this type of linguistic environment may facilitate the development of perspective-taking tools that enhance communication skills. 

Keith Yoder, a fourth year graduate student under the supervision of Dr. Jean Decety, recently published a study that reports how individuals with psychopathy process morally relevant information.  Psychopathy is a personality disorder characterized by a lack of guilt, empathy, and remorse, callous disregard for others, as well as abnormal emotional processing. This study is part of a long-term collaboration between the Decety Lab and Kent Kiehl at Mind Institute, New Mexico. Recently, they showed prisoners scenarios depicting interpersonal harm or assistance, who were requested to make judgments about either the moral or non-moral (physical location) content of the social interaction. The results of the study, published in Translational Psychiatry, indicate that while psychopathy does not impact the accuracy of simple judgments, higher levels of psychopathic traits lead to a shift in network neural activity.  Specifically, inmates with low levels of psychopathy show enhanced neuronal coupling between regions involved in automatic aversive responses to interpersonal harm (e.g., posterior temporal sulcus, amygdala, anterior insula).  Individuals with higher trait psychopathy lack this response, and so must rely on regions such as anterior cingulate to correctly apply explicit rules to label interpersonal harm as morally wrong. This study was funded in part by an NIMH RO1 grant to Dr. Decety.