Bilingual children have better Theory-of-Mind compared to monolingual children, but comparatively little research has examined whether this advantage in social cognitive ability also applies to adults. The current study investigated whether multilingual status and/or number of known languages predicts performance on a mentalizing task in a large sample of adult participants. Multilingualism was decomposed based on whether English is the first language or not. All analyses controlled for well-known predictors of mentalizing, such as gender, same-race bias, and years of English fluency. We found a U-shaped trend, such that monolinguals and multilinguals did not differ much in their mentalizing ability, but bilinguals performed worse than monolinguals. Our study builds upon past work by examining a large sample of participants, measuring a crucial aspect of adult social cognition that has previously been unexplored, controlling for several nuisance variables, and investigating whether multilingualism leads to additional benefits in mentalizing abilities beyond bilingualism.

中文翻译：

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成人的多语言能力和心智化能力

与单语儿童相比，双语儿童具有更好的心理理论，但相对较少的研究检验了这种社会认知能力的优势是否也适用于成年人。当前的研究调查了多语言状态和/或已知语言的数量是否可以预测大量成人参与者在心智化任务中的表现。多语言主义是根据英语是否是第一语言来分解的。所有分析都控制了众所周知的心智化预测因素，例如性别、同种族偏见和英语流利年限。我们发现了一个 U 型趋势，即单语者和多语者在心智化能力上没有太大差异，但双语者的表现比单语者差。我们的研究建立在过去的工作之上，通过检查大量参与者样本，