The bilingual L2 advantage in recognition memory
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BRIEF REPORT
The bilingual L2 advantage in recognition memory Wendy S. Francis & E. Natalia Strobach
# Psychonomic Society, Inc. 2013
Abstract To better understand the mechanisms by which bilingual proficiency impacts memory processes, two recognition memory experiments were conducted with matched monolingual and bilingual samples. In Experiment 1, monolingual speakers of English and Spanish studied high- and low-frequency words under full attention or cognitive load conditions. In Experiment 2, Spanish–English bilingual participants studied high- and low-frequency words under fullattention conditions in each language. For both monolinguals and bilinguals, low-frequency words were better recognized than high-frequency words. The central new findings were that bilingual recognition was more accurate in the less fluent language (L2) than in the more fluent language (L1) and that bilingual L2 recognition was more accurate than monolingual recognition. The bilingual L2 advantage parallels word frequency effects in recognition and is attributed to the greater episodic distinctiveness of L2 words, relative to L1 words. Keywords Recognition memory . Bilingualism . Word frequency . Cognitive load
The bilingual L2 advantage in recognition memory Despite calculations suggesting that over half of the world’s population is bilingual (Harris & McGhee-Nelson, 1992), little research has been devoted to understanding the impact of bilingual language proficiency on verbal memory. Although several studies indicate that recall performance is less accurate in a bilingual’s less fluent language (e.g., Durgunoglu & Roediger, 1987; Glanzer & Duarte, 1971), the impact of proficiency on other measures of explicit memory is relatively unexplored. The present study focuses on two primary questions. First, does bilingual recognition memory performance differ for the more and less fluent languages? W. S. Francis (*) : E. N. Strobach Department of Psychology, University of Texas at El Paso, El Paso, TX 79968, USA e-mail: [email protected]
Second, does recognition performance in bilinguals differ from that of monolinguals? Given previous recall results, it is tempting to assume that bilingual memory performance will always suffer deficits in the less fluent language (L2), relative to the more fluent language (L1) and relative to monolingual performance. However, predictions of bilingual performance depend on the mechanisms by which language proficiency is thought to affect memory encoding and retrieval. Two aspects of bilingual language processing are of particular relevance to memory. First, L2 processing makes greater demands on cognitive resources than does L1 processing (Abu-Rabia, 2003; Ransdell, Arecco, & Levy, 2001). This demand on cognitive resources is related to the construct of cognitive load, which has known effects on explicit memory performance. The cognitive load imposed by performing a concurrent task at study impairs both recall and recognition (e.g., Hicks & Marsh, 2000; Naveh-Benjamin, Craik, Guez, & Dori, 1998). The mech
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