Department of Health Sciences Faculty Articles

Memory in a Monolingual Mode: When Are Bilinguals at a Disadvantage?

Document Type

Article

Publisher

Academic Press

ISSN

0749-596X

Publication Date

8-1987

Keywords

Bilingual, Monolingual, Memory Tasks, Native Speakers, Episodic Recognition, Lexical Decision, Object Naming, Free Recall, English, Data-Driven

Abstract

Comparisons of bilinguals and monolinguals have typically found poorer performance by bilinguals in a variety of memory tasks. However, these studies have used bilinguals who were not native speakers of the monolingual's language, and who were often required to process both languages during the session. In the present study, Native English-speaking bilinguals were compared to English monolinguals on four verbal memory tasks: episodic recognition, lexical decision, object naming, and free recall. Only English words were used in the session to avoid activation of the second language. There were no differences in accuracy between groups on any task. Bilinguals were slower than monolinguals, but only for the list recognition and lexical decision tasks, where language-specific, data-driven processing predominates.

DOI

10.1016/0749-596X(87)90098-2

Volume

26

Issue

4

First Page

392

Last Page

405

Disciplines

Medicine and Health Sciences

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