Final published version
Licence: CC BY: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
}
TY - JOUR
T1 - Foreign cultural norms are better accepted in the second language
AU - Hu, Jiehui
AU - Casaponsa, Aina
AU - Zhang, Wanyu
AU - Jończyk, Rafał
AU - Wu, Yan Jing
AU - Gao, Shan
AU - Thierry, Guillaume
N1 - © 2025 The Author(s). Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of The New York Academy of Sciences.
PY - 2025/8/4
Y1 - 2025/8/4
N2 - Cultural diversity goes hand-in-hand with language variation. It is unknown however, whether using a second language influences one's disposition toward cultural concepts. Here, we show that bilinguals process violations of cultural norms differently depending on whether concepts are introduced in the native (L1) or the second (L2) language. Participants read sentences that were acceptable or not, independent of culture, or acceptable in one culture but not in the other. Culture-independent generic knowledge was integrated similarly across languages, as indexed by N400 modulations of event-related brain potentials, whereas statements conforming to British culture were better accepted by Chinese-English bilinguals when presented in L2 English than L1 Chinese. To our knowledge, these findings offer the first evidence for an effect of language of operation on cultural judgments in bilinguals. Functioning in a second language thus disposes one to be more tolerant toward foreign cultural values, which has important implications in a culturally diverse world.
AB - Cultural diversity goes hand-in-hand with language variation. It is unknown however, whether using a second language influences one's disposition toward cultural concepts. Here, we show that bilinguals process violations of cultural norms differently depending on whether concepts are introduced in the native (L1) or the second (L2) language. Participants read sentences that were acceptable or not, independent of culture, or acceptable in one culture but not in the other. Culture-independent generic knowledge was integrated similarly across languages, as indexed by N400 modulations of event-related brain potentials, whereas statements conforming to British culture were better accepted by Chinese-English bilinguals when presented in L2 English than L1 Chinese. To our knowledge, these findings offer the first evidence for an effect of language of operation on cultural judgments in bilinguals. Functioning in a second language thus disposes one to be more tolerant toward foreign cultural values, which has important implications in a culturally diverse world.
U2 - 10.1111/nyas.15407
DO - 10.1111/nyas.15407
M3 - Journal article
C2 - 40760819
JO - Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences
JF - Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences
SN - 0077-8923
ER -