Second Language Effect on Memory Errors

Human memory is prone to memory errors and distortion. Evidence from studies on cognitive functions in bilinguals indicates that they might experience different types of memory errors compared to monolinguals, however, the effect of language is still understudied. Source monitoring processes required for proper memory functioning, presumably, rely on inhibitory control, which is also heavily utilized by bilinguals. Moreover, it is suggested that thinking in a second language leads to more systematic and deliberate reasoning. Considering all together these results lead to expect that, bilinguals can be more analytical when processing information in their second language and be better at overcoming some of the memory errors. Two experiments were conducted to examine the effect of the language on memory errors in Russian-English bilingual populations. Experiment 1 implemented a misinformation paradigm with explicit source monitoring task. The language of misinformation presentation did not affect the degree of the misinformation effect between Russian and English languages. Source monitoring demonstrated overall higher accuracy for attributions to the English source over the Russian source. Furthermore, analysis on incorrect source attributions showed that when participants misattributed the sources of false information (English or Russian narrative), they favored the Russian source over the not presented condition. Arguably, this indicates that participants could recognize this information as not being new but could not specifically identify as coming from either source. Experiment 2 investigated the effect of the language on monitoring processes, specifically, implementing a self/other reality monitoring paradigm combined with external source monitoring of the language of information presentation. The overall accuracy for English information was higher than for Russian, and for self-generated information – higher than for other-generated. Although there was no difference in correct modality attributions for Russian words, proportion for correct answers for English words for the said modality was higher than for the heard. Regarding incorrect source attributions, for the English source there was no significant difference in misattributions to the Russian or not presented condition. At the same time, for the Russian and not presented sources misattributions to the English source were lower than mutual misattributions to the not presented and Russian. Such results can be explained in that unlike information in Russian, processing information in English required more cognitive effort and therefore was better encoded and recognized. The differences between source correct and incorrect attributions observed in both experiments imply that information processing and memory monitoring in bilinguals can differ depending on the language of the information, which seems lead to some memory errors and not the others. This thesis provides new insights on the influence of the language on memory errors and information processing in bilingual population, as well as the basis for further research of these phenomena.