A recent study carried out by researchers at the Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, Northwestern University, found that people who speak several languages have a larger list of competitor words to communicate, what gives them more advantage when it comes to memory.
According to the findings published in the journal “Science Advances”, when hearing a word, listeners activate other similar-sounding words before settling on the correct target. The researchers also believe that the more objects are looked at during memory encoding, the better they are remembered later on.
Panos Athanasopoulos, professor of Linguistics and English Language, Lancaster University, who was not involved in the study, said: “Second language proficiency played a crucial role. The memory advantage was most profound in bilinguals with high second language proficiency than in bilinguals with low second language proficiency and monolinguals.”
“High Spanish proficiency also enhanced memory, with multilinguals providing a fertile ground for studying the interaction between language and cognition,” he added in an article on the study published on The Conversation website.
The researchers examined whether this kind of cross-language competition leads to better ability in remembering objects. Spanish-English bilinguals and English monolinguals heard a word and had to find the correct item among an array of object images, while their eye movements were recorded.
Participants were required to identify the correct object image after hearing a prompt word. They were then tested on their recognition memory of objects they had previously seen.
The eye tracking data confirmed that items with more competitors were looked at the longest, which led to the memory advantage for those items later on.
“It is not surprising then that bilinguals usually take more time to retrieve or recognize words in psychological and linguistic experiments,” Athanasopoulos said.
These findings show that the bilingual cognitive system is highly interactive and can impact other cognitive components such as recognition memory. Language experience could also influence how people see their current environment, as language directs people’s attention and affects what they remember.
Other studies also show enhanced memory processing in bilinguals relative to monolinguals in categorization tasks that require suppressing distracting information. This could certainly indicate that bilinguals are more efficient at multi-tasking and more able to focus on the task at hand.
