The study of how people process foreign languages has traditionally focused on the topics we wrestled with in high school French or Spanish classes -- botched grammar, misunderstood vocabulary, and mangled phonemes. But in recent years psychologists have gone to the laboratory with a phenomenon that historically was only discussed in memoirs by bilingual writers like Vladimir Nabokov and Eva Hoffman: a foreign language feels less emotional than the mother tongue . Consider the case of taboo words. For many multilinguals, swearing in a foreign language doesn't evoke the same anxiety (or bring the same emotional release) as using a native language. Decreased emotionality in a foreign language spans the gamut of emotions, from saying “I love you,” to hearing childhood reprimands, to uttering morally grave lies, or being influenced by persuasive messages in advertising.
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via Scientific American http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=foreign-language-improve-decisions
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