In a recent article, Hayakawa and Keysar (2018) propose that mental imagery is less vivid when evoked in a foreign than in a native language. The authors argue that reduced mental imagery could even account for moral foreign language effects, whereby moral choices become more utilitarian when made in a foreign language. Here we demonstrate that Hayakawa and Keysar's (2018) key results are better explained by reduced language comprehension in a foreign language than by less vivid imagery. We argue that the paradigm used in Hayakawa and Keysar (2018) does not provide a satisfactory test of reduced imagery and we discuss an alternative paradigm based on recent experimental developments.

中文翻译：

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使用外语会减少心理意象吗？

在最近的一篇文章中，Hayakawa和Keysar（2018）提出，用外国语言唤起的心理意象不如用母语唤起的生动。作者认为，减少的心理意象甚至可以解释道德外语的影响，从而使道德选择在使用外语时变得更加实用。在这里，我们证明了Hayakawa和Keysar（2018）的关键结果可以通过减少对外国语言的理解来更好地解释，而不是通过不太生动的图像来解释。我们认为Hayakawa和Keysar（2018）中使用的范式无法提供令人满意的缩小图像测试，我们根据最近的实验发展讨论了另一范式。