Summary
Prior research indicates that bilinguals make less utilitarian moral decisions in a native versus a foreign language (Costa et al.; Cipolletti, McFarlane, and Weissglass). The present study investigates whether L1 balanced Catalan/Spanish bilinguals similarly make less utilitarian moral decisions in their Language of Identity (“LOI”), and whether education level mediates this phenomenon. Data were analyzed from 84 university students and 80 secondary students in Catalonia. Participants read two scenarios of the classic Trolley Problem (Thomson 205) and chose whether to sacrifice one life to save five, either by pushing a man over a footbridge or pulling a switch. Fixed effects logistic regression models were constructed for both scenarios. The footbridge model reveals a significant interaction effect between education level and reading the dilemma in the participant’s LOI (p = .0052). A Tukey post-hoc analysis indicates that university students selected the less utilitarian response significantly more often than secondary students, but only when responding in their LOI (p = .0006). These results suggest that future research involving multilingualism and moral decision making should account for cognitive differences related to education level and age. Furthermore, qualitative data from 23 post-hoc interviews demonstrate that LOI is a multidimensional variable whose precise delimitation offers fruitful avenues for future scholarship.
Marguerite Morlan
Carmen Pérez-Vidal
https://doi.org/10.17613/64t9-0r33
Marguerite Morlan is a doctoral student pursuing a Ph.D. in Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of California, Berkeley. She organizes the Sociolinguistics Lab at Berkeley and also serves as an Instructor of Hispanic linguistics and Spanish language for undergraduate students. Her research explores language attitudes and identity in the Catalan Countries from a variety of lenses. She has carried out a number of linguistic landscape studies to identify thematic patterns by language in the messages of public-facing walls throughout Catalonia and Northern Catalonia, primarily in transgressive artifacts for which no legal mandate dictates language choice. She has also published on the affective power of incorporating heraldic and other cultural symbols into the mobile linguistic landscape of marches, as well as contrasts in language attitudes and ideologies between autochthonous and international residents of Catalonia (forthcoming from Routledge). She is actively pursuing additional research projects that investigate the performance of large language models (LLMs) and natural language processing (NLP) technologies in minoritized languages, in addition to the salience of Catalan identity across the Spain-France border.
Carmen Pérez-Vidal is the Chair of English Linguistics and Language Acquisition in the Department of Translation and Linguistic Sciences at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF) in Barcelona (Spain). She obtained degrees in Spanish Philology and in English and German Philology, a master’s degree in Applied Linguistics from the University of Reading (UK) and a Ph.D. in Bilingual Language Acquisition from the Universitat de Barcelona. Her research interests lay in the fields of bilingualism and multilingualism, with a special focus on child language, foreign language, formal instruction (FI), CLIL/immersion and language acquisition in Study Abroad (SA) contexts (Pérez-Vidal & Sanz, 2024 Methods in Study Abroad Research: Past, Present and Future; Pérez-Vidal 2014. Language Acquisition in Study Abroad and Formal Instruction Contexts, both in Amsterdam/Philadephia: John Benjamins). She has led numerous national research projects on these matters. She has also served on several European projects, most recently as vice-chair of the European COST action Study Abroad in European Perspective (SAREP). She initiated the AILA Research Network (REN) on Study Abroad.