Abstract
This study compared false memory production in Spanish monolinguals and Spanish-Catalan bilinguals. We used an adjusted Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) false memory paradigm and presented the participants with eight Spanish DRM lists containing 12 words each, along with figures and colors to manipulate contextual details. Free recall results showed higher true recall levels in bilinguals than in monolinguals. However, we did not find notable false memory differences between the monolinguals and bilinguals. We found no differences in the amount of contextual details added in the true and false recall, indicating that levels of confidence in memories are similar in the two groups. Implications of the findings are discussed.
Highlights
The phenomenon of false memory refers to the remembering of an event or detail that either never happened or happened quite differently from reality (Roediger & McDermott, 1995)
An item recalled by the participant that was in accordance with the word list was considered a true recall
To determine whether there was a statistically significant difference between the bilingual Spanish-Catalan group and the monolingual Spanish group in terms of true recall performance, we used a one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA)
Summary
The phenomenon of false memory refers to the remembering of an event or detail that either never happened or happened quite differently from reality (Roediger & McDermott, 1995). The verbatim trace of memory refers to specific details of an experience, such as contextual cues that can allow for distinctions between memories An example of this is the font in which the words of the DRM are presented or the number of phonemes in a word. Given that over half the world population is bilingual (Grosjean, 2008), with higher numbers of bilinguals in urban areas compared to rural ones (Bialystok, Craik, & Luk, 2012), and that urbanization is expected to increase from 55% to 68% (“68% of the world population,” 2018), it is important to study bilinguals in urban societies It is of interest whether the production of false memories differs between monolinguals and bilinguals. It is relevant to understand whether bilinguals produce more or fewer false memories and whether the first or second language could impact false memory production
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