Memory for non-native language: The role of lexical processing in the retention of surface form

Abstract

Research on memory for native language (L1) has consistently shown that retention of surface form is inferior to that of gist (e.g., Sachs, 1967). This paper investigates whether the same pattern is found in memory for non-native language (L2). We apply a model of bilingual word processing to more complex linguistic structures and predict that memory for L2 sentences ought to contain more surface information than L1 sentences. Native and non-native speakers of English were tested on a set of sentence pairs with different surface forms but the same meaning (e.g., "The bullet hit/struck the bull's eye"). Memory for these sentences was assessed with a cued recall procedure. Responses showed that native and non-native speakers did not differ in the accuracy of gist-based recall but that non-native speakers outperformed native speakers in the retention of surface form. The results suggest that L2 processing involves more intensive encoding of lexical level information than L1 processing.

Non-native Readers Are More Sensitive to Changes in Surface Linguistic Information than Native Readers*

“…Our study thus supports the results of Sampaio and Konopka (2013), but advances them in two important directions. First, unlike Sampaio and Konopka or also, e.g., Kintsch and Bates (1977) and Gibbs (1981), we did not test verbatim memory of open-class lexical items only, but also of syntactic information.…”

“…In contexts that were demanding (i.e., syntactically complex) for L2 learners, these acquired better both the meaning and the grammatical properties of unknown words during reading compared to L1 speakers and compared to the condition when they read syntactically undemanding texts. Such findings indicate that the focus of less proficient readers/speakers might be more directed at lower-level information than that of adult L1 speakers and that this behaviour does not have to be limited to individual lexical items as suggested by Sampaio and Konopka (2013).…”

“…A pioneering aspect of our study is the employment of eye-tracking to explore information retention during reading. In the previous research (also that including exploration of mental text models) participants have typically been asked to give explicit judgements (e.g., the recognition experiment by Gurevich et al, 2010, or the task in Sampaio & Konopka, 2013) or to productively recall the critical sentences/text (e.g., production experiment of Gurevich et al, 2010). Such approaches enable an assessment of explicit knowledge that participants are able to retrieve, yet the human brain stores much more than what can be consciously accessed or actively produced.…”

“…Interestingly – and perhaps because these L1 results have remained unchallenged for so many years – there is to our knowledge only one study that has directly addressed the retention of surface information in L2. In a cued sentence recall procedure, Sampaio and Konopka (2013) showed that while L1 and L2 speakers recall equally well the gist of a sentence like “ The bullet STRUCK the bull's eye ”, the L2 speakers recall better the verbatim phrasing of sentences with non-preferred lexical items (e.g., STRUCK vs. HIT ) and are thus more sensitive to synonymous lexical substitutions in such sentences. According to the authors, the L1 vs. L2 difference arises due to the nature of the lexical-semantic pathways that support processing in L1 and L2.…”

Effects of intelligibility on within- and cross-modal sentence recognition memory for native and non-native listeners

“…5 Another possible account for poorer cross-modal recognition memory in non-native compared to native listeners is that non-native listeners might engage qualitatively different cognitive processes in L1 and L2. Sampaio and Konopka (2013) suggested that L2 speakers might rely to a greater extent on lower-level surface forms when recalling sentences than native speakers, who may instead rely more on "gist" memory (Fuzzy-Trace theory, Reyna and Brainerd, 2011). It is possible that in the present study, non-native listeners relied more heavily on the signal-level information and needed the specific acoustic signal to activate stored memory traces.…”