Adaptive memory: Greater memory advantages in bilinguals’ first language

Abstract

In this study, we examined memory performance in a bilingual population, in an effort to compare depth of processing and complexity across first and second languages. Complexity was investigated with a pleasantness rating task and an elaborative encoding, scenario-based rating task (i.e. rating words for their survival-relevance). Previous research found word recall largely benefited from an ancestral context that primed participants to think deeply about the survival-relevance of a list of concrete, neutral words. Engaging this more elaborative processing may lead to better memory if the human memory system is particularly tuned toward remembering survival-relevant materials. Participants included 127 Spanish-English bilinguals, randomly-assigned to complete survival-relevance or pleasantness ratings in either Spanish or English. Aggregated language history data self-reported by participants (e.g. language-learning environments, age of acquisition, and so on), suggested an L1 of Spanish and L2 of English. An analysis of variance (ANOVA) compared word recall across these tasks and languages. We hypothesized better recall performance collected from bilingual participants in the survival condition using their first, more often emotional, language. Our results support this hypothesis, with bilinguals replicating the memory advantage for words rated for their survival-relevance in Spanish (their L1), but not in English (their L2). While this paradigm has largely been studied with monolingual English-speakers, or in some cases, other languages, no study has explored its replicability in a Spanish-English bilingual population’s two languages. These findings speak to the on-going effort to understand word processing and memory differences—particularly with regards to processing complexity—across bilinguals’ first and second languages.