Analogical Transfer of Problem Solutions within and between Languages in Spanish–English Bilinguals

Abstract

Previous cognitive research on transfer of learning in bilingual participants has used simple tasks such as word learning. In the present study, an analogical transfer paradigm was used to examine transfer of high-level conceptual information between languages. Experiment 1 examined analogical transfer from a single source story to a target problem in the same or in a different language with Spanish–English bilinguals. Experiment 2 exploited the competitive nature of retrieval in analogical transfer using a more sensitive design in which the target problem was preceded by two source analogs suggesting different solutions. Even with a total of 207 participants across the two experiments, transfer was not significantly or substantially affected by the match or mismatch between the languages of the source and target problems. However, in Experiment 2, the competition between alternative source analogs was greater when the languages of the two analogs matched than when they mismatched. These experiments show that the aspects of memory representations important for higher-order processes such as analogical transfer are primarily language-general and that language-specific features play only a minor role when retrieving and applying information relevant to problem-solving.