Serial-position effects on a free-recall task in bilinguals

Abstract

In this study, we examined mechanisms that underlie free-recall performance in bilinguals’ first language (L1) and second language (L2) through the prism of serial-position effects. On free-recall tasks, a typical pattern of performance follows a U-shaped serial-position curve, where items from the beginning of the list (the primacy effect) and items from the end of the list (the recency effect) are recalled with higher accuracy than items from the middle of the list. The present study contrasted serial-position effects on the free-recall task in Korean-English bilinguals’ L1 vs. L2 and examined the relationship between an independent working memory (WM) measure and serial-position effects in bilinguals’ two languages. Results revealed stronger pre-recency (primacy and middle) effects in L1 than in L2, but similar recency effects in the two languages. A close association was observed between WM and recall performance in the pre-recency region in the L1 but not in the L2. Together, these findings suggest that linguistic knowledge constrains free-recall performance in bilinguals, but only in the pre-recency region.

Discourse-Level Information Recall in Early and Late Bilinguals: Evidence From Single-Language and Cross-Linguistic Tasks

“…In SLR, EBs recalled more information than LBs. This aligns with previous studies showing that AoA is associated with information encoding and retrieval in cued word (Yoo and Kaushanskaya, 2016;Macmillan et al, 2021) and picture (Volkovyskaya et al, 2017) extends these findings, suggesting that AoA can also modulate information recall in the face of ecological textual materials.…”

“…First, our sample size was moderate. Although it was supported by power estimation results and it proved similar to or larger than those of other relevant studies in the field (Sabourin et al, 2014;Giezen et al, 2015;Yoo and Kaushanskaya, 2016), future research should replicate our experiment with more participants. Second, the current study used only two tasks, with brief texts allowing for no interaction.…”

“…Age of second language (L2) acquisition (AoA) has been shown to influence various memory processes in bilinguals ( Yoo and Kaushanskaya, 2016 ; Volkovyskaya et al, 2017 ; Macmillan et al, 2021 ). However, most studies have employed random or arbitrary sequences of disconnected stimuli, failing to assess whether AoA impacts a critical aspect of daily communication: the ability to recall information from unfolding discourse.…”

Russian–German five-year-olds: What omissions in sentence repetition tell us about linguistic knowledge, memory skills and their interrelation

“…We observed overall serial order effects in the SRTs in German and Russian: in contrast to Alloway and Gathercole (2005), we found that the medial position was especially vulnerable to omissions in both languages, showing a higher number than the final or initial position. This finding confirms a great body of literature from cognitive psychology on primacy and recency effects in other types of recall tasks (e.g., Yoo & Kaushanskaya, 2016;Brown et al, 2017;Hitch et al, 2020), as well as some early studies on typical child language acquisition, such as Gleitman et al (1984). Additionally, in German, those children whose identical repetition scores are better are more likely to maintain the initial and final positions and omit only in the medial position, while children with low identical repetition scores are more likely to omit items in all three positions.…”

How Effectively Do People Remember Voice Disordered Speech? An Investigation of the Serial-Position Curve

“…If listening to voice disordered speech is a sufficiently adverse listening situation, then memory might be hindered, but effects might not manifest evenly across all of the words in a list. For example, the typical u-shaped serial-position curve of word recall, in which there is a primacy effect (i.e., the beginning of the list is remembered better than the middle) and a recency effect (i.e., the end of the list is remembered better than the middle), can be altered by adverse listening situations, such as background noise [ 10 , 11 ] and second language processing [ 12 ]. Specifically, evidence indicates that, in some cases, adverse listening situations can reduce the primacy effect and/or recency effect.…”