Cross-language postevent misinformation effects in Spanish–English bilingual witnesses.

Abstract

Three experiments examined whether postevent misinformation affects eyewitness memory across languages in bilingual witnesses. Participants watched a videotaped simulation of a robbery, read a postevent narrative that contained misleading information about the robbery, and answered either forced-choice or cued-recall questions about 6 target items from the videotape. Experiment 1 was conducted entirely in English, but Experiments 2 and 3 tested Spanish-English bilingual participants who were exposed to 1 of 3 language combinations of the postevent narrative and memory test-Spanish-Spanish, English-Spanish, or Spanish-English (as well as English-English in Experiment 3). Across all 3 experiments, the effects of postevent misinformation were as large in the cross-language conditions as in the same-language conditions. This study has important implications for the justice system, and the results suggest new ways to study postevent misinformation effects and bilingual memory.