Bilingualism and individual differences in short-term ordered serial recall.

Abstract

In two experiments, we examined whether individual differences in bilingual language proficiency predict immediate serial recall in a language-specific manner. A total of 96 French-English bilinguals completed an immediate serial recall task involving 40 lists of 6 words, followed by the LexTALE lexical decision task in both French and English to index lexical knowledge continuously. Experiment 1 used visually presented word lists and included both pure-language lists and alternating-language lists; Experiment 2 replicated the same design with auditory presentation. Across experiments, LexTALE scores reliably predicted recall accuracy for words presented in the corresponding language, such that participants with stronger lexical knowledge in a given language recalled more items from that language. This language-specific proficiency-recall relation held across list contexts and generalised across visual and auditory modalities. The findings support accounts in which immediate serial recall is constrained by the strength of language-specific long-term lexical representations that support retrieval during short-term remembering.