Release from proactive inhibition as a function of a language of pronunciation shift in bilinguals.

Abstract

French-English bilinguals were presented with four tests on a Brown-Peterson distractor task with spoken pairs of CVCs which varied in language of pronunciation and meaningfulness. On the fourth test, three of the four groups received a shift along one or both of these dimensions. Significantly increased recall was obtained following the language shift, the meaningfulness shift and their combination. Subsequent analysis, however, revealed that the increase in recall occurred only when high meaningful CVCs were presented on the shift trials. The results were interpreted as showing that release from proactive inhibition as a function of a language shift in bilinguals can be explained through the hypothesis of separate phonological systems and does not require the postulation of separate semantic reference systems.

Cognitive integration of language and memory in bilinguals: Semantic representation.

“…Dillon et al (1973) suggested that the change in phoneme set across languages causes the language-shift recovery. O’Neill and Huot (1984) evaluated this possibility with recall of consonant-vowel-consonant nonsense syllables presented auditorially with either English or French pronunciations. Bilinguals exhibited substantial recovery (46%) when the language of pronunciation changed.…”

“…Some examples illustrate the inconsistency in the intent to include or exclude semantic information from the lexicon. First, many cognitive researchers clearly separate the lexicon from a conceptual or semantic store (Caramazza & Brones, 1980;de Groot, 1992b;Gerard & Scarborough, 1989;Glucksberg, 1984;Kirsner, Brown, Abrol, Chadha, & Sharma, 1980;O'Neill & Huot, 1984;Potter et al, 1984;Smith, 1991). In contrast, other researchers clearly include semantic information in the lexicon (e.g., Marslen-Wilson et al, 1994;Schreuder & Weltens, 1993;Schwanenflugel & Rey, 1986).…”

“…It is not clear whether these terms are meant to refer to the same thing or whether semantic information is meant to be a subset of conceptual information. In some articles, the terms are used interchangeably (e.g., Gerard & Scarborough, 1989;Smith, 1991), but in others only one term or the other is used exclusively (semantic only: e.g., Glanzer & Duarte, 1971;Kolers & Gonzalez, 1980;O'Neill & Huot, 1984; conceptual only: e.g., Watkins & Peynircioglu, 1983). In this article, I use the terms semantic and conceptual interchangeably.…”

The effects of age of language acquisition on verbal memory tests in a sample of older adults immigrants.

“…The effect of ALA and LU on learning and recall of verbal information was studied using various experimental paradigms. Early studies of verbal memory among bilinguals examined whether there was interference or acceleration of word production after the presentation of stimuli (Tulving & Colotla, 1970; Durgunoglu & Roediger, 1987), whether the recall of words improves when translation is used as an encoding strategy (Paivio & Lambert, 1981), and whether there is a release from proactive interference when subjects moved from a list of words in one language to a list of words in another language (O’Neill & Huot, 1984). Based on these studies, two contradictory models emerged.…”