Word-context associations in episodic memory are learned at the conceptual level: Word frequency, bilingual proficiency, and bilingual status effects on source memory.

[Correction Notice: An Erratum for this article was reported in Vol 45(10) of Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition (see record 2019-53018-001). In the article, a formula error in the scoring spreadsheet for bilingual participants in Experiment 3 systematically inflated their accuracy scores. Therefore, statistical information for analyses involving the bilingual sample, and bilingual portions of Table 7 and Figure 3 have been corrected. All versions of this article have been corrected.] Three source-memory experiments were conducted with Spanish-English bilinguals and monolingual English speakers matched on age, education, nonverbal cognitive ability and socioeconomic status. Bilingual language proficiency and dominance were assessed using standardized objective measures. In Experiment 1, source was manipulated visuo-spatially, in Experiment 2, source was manipulated temporally, and in Experiment 3, source was manipulated by presenting stimuli in different modalities. Bilingual source discrimination was more accurate for low-frequency words than for high-frequency words, but it did not differ for the more fluent and less fluent languages (L1 and L2, respectively). These results contrast with the L2 advantage observed in item recognition (Francis & Gutiérrez, 2012; Francis & Strobach, 2013), adding to evidence that the bases of performance for item and source memory differ. The dissociation of word frequency and language effects indicates that word-context associations are made at the conceptual level rather than the word-form level. Bilinguals exhibited more accurate source discrimination than monolinguals, both under intentional and incidental encoding conditions, indicating that this effect cannot be explained entirely by differences in encoding strategies. We reason that relative to monolinguals, bilinguals more efficiently encode associations between word concepts and contexts or other types of information that do not convey meaning preexperimentally. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

The bilingual L2 advantage in recognition memory.

To better understand the mechanisms by which bilingual proficiency impacts memory processes, two recognition memory experiments were conducted with matched monolingual and bilingual samples. In Experiment 1, monolingual speakers of English and Spanish studied high- and low-frequency words under full attention or cognitive load conditions. In Experiment 2, Spanish-English bilingual participants studied high- and low-frequency words under full-attention conditions in each language. For both monolinguals and bilinguals, low-frequency words were better recognized than high-frequency words. The central new findings were that bilingual recognition was more accurate in the less fluent language (L2) than in the more fluent language (L1) and that bilingual L2 recognition was more accurate than monolingual recognition. The bilingual L2 advantage parallels word frequency effects in recognition and is attributed to the greater episodic distinctiveness of L2 words, relative to L1 words.