Date of Award

2014

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Social Sciences

First Advisor

Harley, Heidi

Keywords

English, Spanish, Information Processing, Bilingual

Area of Concentration

Psychology

Abstract

In recent years, there has been an increasing focus on studying bilingualism and how it affects cognition. Nevertheless, little is known about the role of bilingualism in working memory. In an attempt to understand the way that language is encoded in memory, the current study focused on the effects of language-change and language-mixing on proactive interference. Forty Spanish-English young adult bilinguals participated in the study. Participants were given sets of four lists composed of words from the same category (e.g., animals) all in one language (Spanish or English) in the single-language condition, lists in which the first three were in one language (e.g., Spanish) and the last in the other (e.g., English) in the language-change condition, and four lists made up of a combination of both languages (Spanish and English) in the mixed-language condition. Each individual performed the task in all five conditions (single-language in Spanish, single-language in English, language-change in Spanish, language-change in English, and language-mixing with Spanish and English). Words were presented one at a time until the end of a list, followed by a distractor task, and then by free recall of that list. Participants' performance improved when they changed language in the language-change condition, as measured by both higher accuracy and reduced intrusion errors, compared to the single- language condition. In addition, performance was the same for the language-mixing and single-language conditions with respect to accuracy and intrusion errors. Finally, the incidence of language errors was very low. A proposed model consistent with these results includes a common representation of concepts shared between languages which are mostly isolated from each other, but are activated along with lexical items. Because both the concept and the lexical item have to be remembered in this task, changing language releases the participants from the interference of other similar same-language lexical items when participants are using a new language, but not interference from shared concepts. On the other hand, with language-mixing, lexical items from both languages as well as concepts need to remain in working-memory.

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