Do Bilinguals Access a Shared Or Separate Conceptual Store? Creating False Memories in a Mixed-Language Paradigm Aaron Mitchel Macalester College
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Macalester College DigitalCommons@Macalester College Psychology Honors Projects Psychology Department May 2005 Do Bilinguals Access a Shared or Separate Conceptual Store? Creating False Memories in a Mixed-Language Paradigm Aaron Mitchel Macalester College Follow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/psychology_honors Recommended Citation Mitchel, Aaron, "Do Bilinguals Access a Shared or Separate Conceptual Store? Creating False Memories in a Mixed-Language Paradigm" (2005). Psychology Honors Projects. Paper 1. http://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/psychology_honors/1 This Honors Project is brought to you for free and open access by the Psychology Department at DigitalCommons@Macalester College. It has been accepted for inclusion in Psychology Honors Projects by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@Macalester College. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Do BilingualsAccess Abstract A centralfocus of bilingualisrnresearch is therepresentation of two languagesystems in memory.The Revised Hierarchical Model (Iftoll & Stewart,lgg4) predictsthat bilingualsaccess conceptual information from both languages simultaneously. To testthis hypothesis, the present study attempted to createfalse memories across languages.Twenty-two Spanish-English bilinguals participated in a mixedlanguage associativelist paradigm,False recognition of targetwords was significantlyhigher thanfalse recognition of controlwords, both within andbetween languages. These resultsprovide evidence for a sharedconceptual store and parallel activation of languages,supporting the Revised Hierarchical Model, Do BilingualsAccess Do BilingualsAccess a Sharedor SeparateConceptual Store: Creating False Memoriesin a Mixed-LanguageParadigm The majorityof the world's populationspeaks two or morelanguages. Despitethis, the majorityof psychologicalresearch into languagehas focused on monolinguals.Recently, however, there has been a surgeof interestin bilingualism. A centralissue in currentbilingual research concerns the representationoflanguages in memory,Specifically, are two languagesstored together, or separately? Additionally,how arethese two languagesactivated? Thesequestions form the basis for two competingmodels of bilingual languageprocessing The independencehypothesrs proposes that thereare distinct andseparate memory stores for eachlanguage, such that processingin onelanguage doesnot affectprocessing in the other, In contrast,the interdepmdence hypothesis maintainsthat thereis a sirrgleintegrated flemory store(see Gerard & Scarborough, 1989).The goal of the presentstudy is to examineeach of thesemodels and address thequestions raised earlier, the first of whichis how two languagesare accessed, or activated. Definitions The terminologyused in the bilingualliteiature varies considerably, and so it is helpfulto haveprecise operational definitions. First, what constitutes bilingualism?Definitions of bilingualismcan range anywhere from informal experiencewith two or morelanguages to near-nativefluency in two languages.As Francis(1999) suggests, a middle ground must be foundbetween these two extremes. Thus,for the purposesof this paper,bilinguals are those who areable to Do BilingualsAccess communicate,at somelevel, in morethan one language, This definitionis admittedly very broadand simple, Howeverra narrowdefinition incorrectly excludes many peoplewho wouldconsider themselves bilingual. For instance,some people can speaka languageyet areunable to reador write in a language.At the sametime, thereare many people who areable to reador write in a languagebut areunable to speakthe language(this is particularlycommon if the languagewas learnedin a schoolsetting).In addition,many people in theUnited States are native English speakerswho canneither read nor write andmay not speakwith "proper"grammar, yet arenative English speakers nonetheless. Because of thisvaried nature of languageproficiency and use, broad definitions of bilingualismare inevitable. It is alsoimporlant to definethe termsler.ical and conceptual. A lexicon, definedherein, is a collectionof lexicalentries, or knowledgeabout a particularword that includesofihographic, phonologic, morphologic, syntactic, and semantic properties(Francis, 1999). Theuse of lexiconand lexical variesgreatly among studiesand models, and so the presentpaper uses a broaddefinition to incorporatea Exeaterrange of literature. Theconceptual level of representationconcerns the meaningsof words. Thereis somedisagreement in the literaturebetween the termssemantic and conceptual,as some researchers will usethem interchangeably while otherstudies differentiatebetween the terms (Francis, 1999), Herein, the two termsare used interchangeablyunless otherwise noted. Both areused to referto meaning-leveL information. Do BilingualsAccess Ac tivat ion of Languages How is informationretrieved from the bilingual lexicon? When presented with a word, do bilingualsactivate one lexicon at a time,both at the sametime, or do theyuse cues to activateonly the appropriatelexicon? Beauvillain and Grainger (1987)and Grainger and Dijkstra (1992) suggest that there is an initial activationof bothlanguages, and that language selection occurs at a laterstage. Several studies provideevidence for suchparallel activation of lexicons. TheStroop effect is interferencethat occurswhen attempting to namean item with incongruentmeaning and form(e.g., the word blue printedin yellow ink). While thiseffect has been well establishedin monolinguals(c. f Macleod, I 991),do bilingualsexperience this sameinterference when the printedwords are in one language(language A) andcolor namingis in anotherlanguage (language B)? chen andHo ( I 986)hypothesized that if only onelanguage is activatedat a time,then there will be no Stroopeffect because there is no lexicalactivation of the printedwords in languageB andtherefore no lexicalinformation to interferewith color naming, However,interference in this conditionwas comparable to interferencein conditions whereboth the printedwords and color namingwere in the samelanguage. Thus, lexical inforrnationwas availableftom both languages,supporting the parallel activationhypothesis (for a furtherreview of bilingualStroop experiments, see Smith, reeT). Fufthersupport for parallellexical activation comes from Nas ( 1983).In a lexicaldecision task, Nas instructed Dutch-English bilingual subjects to onlyrespond yesto Englishwords and no to anythingelse, including Dutch words. If only one Do BilingualsAccess lexiconis availableat a time,then in a languagespecific task there should be no interferencefrom the otherlanguage. However, participants were slower to respond to non-Englishwords if thestimulus was eithEr a Dutchword or soundedlike a Dutch word. Thisinterference is evidencethat both lexicons are activated simultaneously. Finally,a seriesof eyetrackingexperiments reveal that bilinguals activate both languagesin parallel(Spivey & Marian,1999; Marian, Spivey, & Hirsch,2003; Marian& Spivey,2003). Russian-Englishbilinguals were asked in onelanguage to pick up oneof four objectsplaced in frontof themand their gaze was followedwith afl eyetracker. Whenasked to pick up the targetobject, the participants'gaee briefly shiftedto an interlingualdistractor object whose name in the irrelevantlanguage was phoneticallysimilar to thetarget object (Spivey & Marian,1999; Marian, Spivey, & Hirsch,2003). For example,when participants were told in Russianto pick up the stamp("marku"), their gazefixated upon the marker,the distractorobject. The Englishword "maxker,"phonetically similar to "marku,"should not havebeen distractinghad only theRussian lexicon been available. However, because it was distracting(significantly moreso than the other two objects),these results suggest that bilingualsactivate both languagesin parallel. Additionally,it appearsthat the irrelevantlanguage cannot be deactivatedwhile in a completelymonolingual context (Marianet, al, 2003). In anothereyetracking experiment, Marian and Spivey (2003) comparedRussian-English bilinguals with Englishspeaking monolinguals. While bothbilinguals and monolinguals experienced within-language competition (i.e., Englishdistractor items and English target objects), only bilingualsexperienced between-languagecompetition (i.e. Russian distractor items and English target items). Do BilingualsAccess Thisdifference in performanceprovides further suppoft for theparallel activation of languages. Representationof Languagesin Memory Thereis muchdebate over the natureof bilinguallanguage representation. Do bilingualshave one lexicon for bothlanguages or hvo discreetlexicons? Likewise, what is the natureof conceptualrepresentation in bilingualmemory? A reviewof the literatureon the debatesuggests that the majorityof the evidencesupports the existenceofseparate lexicons and a sharedconceptual store (Francis, 1999); thus, the presentstudy focuses specifically on this evidence. Evidencefor separate le.ricons Is lexicalinformation in bilingualsstored in oneshared lexicon or two separatelexicons? The literature on thesubject suggests that the bilingual has two distinctlexical representations in memory,one for eachlanguage (for a review,see smith, 1997;Gollan & Kroll, 2001). In a fragmentcompletion task, Durgunofrlu and Roediger(1987) found that the only variableto significantlyaffect completion rates was languageoverlap between study and test sections of the test. If the participants studiedthe list of wordsin the samelanguage as the completiontask, they hadhigher ratesof