Linguistic Schemata: The Differential Recall of Accidental Events in Spanish-Fluent Bilinguals and English Monolinguals During Reading

Abstract

Since the first recognition that language could sway eye-witness testimony, research into event processing has set out to explore the generalizability of language's effects on recall (Loftus & Palmer 1974;Shaw, Garcia, & Robles 1997). The current study considered whether Schema Theory can be applied to linguistic frameworks and, from there, aimed to uncover the extent to which language background and word choice impact the ability to encode and recall environmental stimuli. Because languages utilize differing syntactic patterns to frame certain events, making some grammatical word types more or less salient to speakers, the analysis of environmental processing in this study was constrained to a single event type known to differ in the Spanish and English syntax: accidents. Tests of memory for noun and verb word types were administered to individuals with or without Spanish fluency to determine whether language groups differentially process environmental stimuli when reading about accidents. Assessments of the effect of sensory experience rating (SER) on target word recall were carried out to reveal whether word-specific sensory characteristics or general language syntax is more influential to stimuli salience and encoding. The study found a significant main effect of word type on differential recall by language background and found that SER did not significantly affect memory. The findings may imply the importance of the right superior parietal lobe in event-framing, based on the region's role in grammatical processing and cognitive inhibition --both of which are thought to be at play when encoding event stimuli through the framework of a syntactic schema. The 4 study argued that the conclusions not only make a claim for language effects beginning during event encoding, and carrying into recall ability, but also supported the proposed existence of syntactic schema that frame event processing according to individual's L1 (native language) grammatical patterns.* HN and LN refer to high SER nouns and low SER nouns, respectively.Similarly, HV and LV refer to high and low SER verbs.