Serial memory error patterns in bilinguals and monolinguals

Abstract

Research shows that bilinguals tend to outperform monolinguals on certain cognitive tasks. While these advantages are typically attributed to differences in executive function, serial memory and syntactic processing may also help account for the differences observed between these populations. Bilinguals have been shown to outperform monolinguals on a variety of memory recall tasks, but it remains unclear whether these findings generalize to tasks involving serial memory. To answer this question, a digit recall task was administered to 11 monolingual and 11 bilingual participants. An algorithm was built to analyze the digit recall data and examine the mechanism underpinning the differences in memory performance in bilingual and monolingual participants. The algorithm found bilinguals making significantly fewer transpositional errors than monolinguals in the recall task (p < .005). One follow-up question pertained to the role of L1 syntactic processing as a possible predictor of serial memory error patterns. To test this question, a sentence recall task was administered to the same sample after completing the digit recall task. This task tested if bilingual exposure could predict syntactic memory error patterns. A Pearson's Chi-squared test found null results, leaving the transpositional error findings open for interpretation.