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Dr. Debra Titone (McGill University)
March 21, 2025
9:00 am
Foster Auditorium, Pattee and Paterno Library

Dr. Debra Titone (McGill University)

Reading-To-Think: How We Decode, Reason, and Make Decisions in a First and Second Language

Every day, we reason and make decisions based on what we read in our first or second language. For example, we might read a social media post and decide whether to like or share it, or read job application materials and decide whom to hire. Research in cognitive and neural sciences explores the mechanisms of reading (e.g., decoding words, sentences, and discourse) and thinking (e.g., inferencing, reasoning, decision making), but rarely are the full range of processes investigated all together. On this point, recent work on the "Foreign Language Effect" has raised the possibility that bilingual people make decisions differently when reading in a second language compared to their first, or that bilingual experiences lead to decision-making differences between bilingual and monolingual individuals, regardless of the language used. However, assuming such effects are robust and general, the underlying mechanisms are not well understood, as few studies have directly examined how reading processes link to goal-driven decisions. Debra Titone refers to this collective capacity as "Reading-To-Think," inspired by cognitive linguistics approaches like "Thinking-for-Speaking" (Slobin, 1987) as well as psycholinguistic theories that integrate language and cognitive processes (e.g., Stanovich & Cunningham, 1991; Gernsbacher, 1991, 1995). In this talk, she highlights ongoing work from her laboratory that investigates how multilingual adults read-to-think in their first and second languages across a variety of domains. This includes texts requiring inferencing and decision making (logical, mentalizing, and ironic inferences) and texts requiring moral reasoning and decision making.