Effects of a Bilingual Context on Memory Performance

Abstract

Abstract In this chapter, we explore when bilingual presentation of material hurts, helps, or has no effect on memory performance. To date, considerable data have suggested that bilingual subjects often show poorer performance on various tasks such as free recall, recognition, object, word, or digit naming, especially if the tasks involve bilingual presentation or material (e.g., Magiste, 1079). In such studies, bilingual subjects are slower and sometimes also less accurate. There are, however, also studies mat show no differences between performance in bilingual and monolingual contexts (e.g., Kolers, 1966) as well as studies mat show an advantage in favor of bilingual contexts (e.g., Peynircioglu & Tekcan, in press). We first review the literature on when a bilingual context hurts, helps, or has no effect on memory performance and look at the various theoretical accounts that have followed such results. We then report two new studies looking at some of the conditions under which bilingual presentation hurts, nelps, or has no effect on memory. In the first experiment, we show mat bilingual subjects have a larger memory span if words are presented in two different languages than if they are presented in a single language, but only if the words in the mixed-language condition are blocked by language (e.g., house, lake, green, nube, mundo, chico for Spanish-English bilinguals) and not if they alternate (house, nube, lake, mundo, green, chico). In the second experiment, we show that performance on a word-fragment completion task can be enhanced by studying the target word's translation; however, neither the type of orienting task engaged in during the study phase (conceptual or perceptual) nor the similarities between the characteristics of the study language (Spanish or Chinese) and the test language (English) influence word-fragment completion performance.