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Phonological memory in bilinguals and monolinguals
Jeewon Yoo1, Margarita Kaushanskaya
1Department of Communicative Disorders, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1975 Willow Drive, Madison, WI 53706, USA. yoo9@wisc.edu
Memory & Cognition
|August 22, 2012
Summary
Monolingual and bilingual adults
Area of Science:
- Cognitive Psychology
- Psycholinguistics
- Neuroscience
Background:
- Phonological memory is crucial for language acquisition and processing.
- Bilingualism's impact on cognitive functions like phonological memory is an area of ongoing research.
- Lexical-semantic knowledge and task difficulty are potential moderators of these effects.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate how lexical-semantic knowledge and task difficulty affect phonological memory in monolingual and bilingual adults.
- To compare the performance of proficient monolingual English speakers with proficient bilingual Korean-English speakers on phonological memory tasks.
- To determine the interplay between language proficiency, lexical-semantic demands, and task difficulty in phonological memory.
Main Methods:
- Participants included monolingual English speakers and bilingual Korean-English speakers, with varying English proficiency.
- Phonological memory was assessed using English tasks with manipulated lexical-semantic content (word-span, digit-span, nonword repetition) and difficulty levels.
- Performance differences between monolinguals and bilinguals were analyzed across task types and difficulty variations.
Main Results:
- On word-span tasks, monolinguals excelled at easier levels, while bilinguals outperformed them at harder levels.
- For digit-span and nonword repetition, monolinguals initially outperformed bilinguals, but differences diminished as task difficulty increased.
- Proficiency-based performance variations in phonological memory are contingent on task-specific lexical-semantic reliance and difficulty.
Conclusions:
- Phonological memory performance differences between monolinguals and bilinguals are not uniform.
- The degree of lexical-semantic involvement and task difficulty significantly modulate bilinguals' and monolinguals' phonological memory capabilities.
- Understanding these factors is key to accurately assessing cognitive differences related to bilingualism.
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