Memory is one of the most explored areas in psychology. It is defined as a means by which individuals retrieve past experiences for purposes of using the information in the present. It also refers to the process by which individuals retain and maintain the information about past events (Cardwell & Flanagan, 2005). Memory is conceptualized by many psychologists as an information processing system that involved three fundamental processes. The processes are encoding, storage and retrieval (Nevid, 2013). Encoding involve changing the information format that is usable in memory while storage means retaining the information in memory. On the other hand, retrieval involves recovering the information stored in the memory. Today, psychologists have established a number of factors that have influence on memory. This paper has paid attention to the effect of second language on memory. Growing evidence from memory researches suggest that bilinguals are better than monolinguals in some cognitive tasks that require memorization (Morales, Calvo & Bialystok, 2013). The issue of cognitive advantages of bilinguals over monolingual was researched by Ljungberg, Andes, Hansson, Josefsson and Nilsson in their study titled ‘A Longitudinal Study of Memory Advantages in Bilinguals.” The main objective of their study was to investigate whether bilinguals and monolingual differed in episodic memory recall, category and verbal letter fluency. Episodic memory stores and retrieves information about the event that occurred and when and where it occurred (Heyes & Huber, 2000). The study used 178 participants who had participated in Betula Prospective Cohort Study on health, ageing and memory. The study was conducted between 1988 and 2008. Women accounted for 44.9% of the participants who had a mean age of mean age 49.9 years and a standard deviation 9.9 years. The participants who had reported fluency in a second language were given Language History Questionnaire (LHQ) to complete. The scores in the questionnaire ranged from 1 to 6 representing very poor and excellent respectively. LHQ was used to measure the participants’ ability to read, write, speak and listen to a second language. The participants who scored 4 and above in all the four areas tested were categorized as bilinguals. The other participants were placed in monolingual category. Majority of bilingual participants, 95%, had reported that English was their second language. They also indicated that they started learning English at the age of about 9 years while in primary school and they had an average of 7 years of training in the language. Majority, 64%, used the second language while travelling, 29% and 7% used it at work and home respectively. Four in every five participants acknowledged that they spent between 0 and 2 hours a day using the language. Three different recall tasks were presented to the participants to measure episodic memory. In the first task, recall of actions and sentences, participants were given 16 noun verb sentences in two lists. The sentences denoted simple actions. In the first list, participants were told to enact each sentence in about 8 seconds using a specified object. The second list did not involve enactment. Each list was followed by recall test. The performance of each participant was measured by finding out the number of recalled sentence in the two lists. In the second task, category cued recall of nouns; the participants were given 32 sentences that could be divided into 8 semantic categories. They were informed that the sentences may serve as cues for remembering the nouns. The performance was measured by counting the number of nouns recalled from enacted actions and without enactment. In the third task, recall focused attention; a list of 12 words was presented to each participant. The experimenter read out the content of the list at a pace of two items per second. The number of recalled words was used as a measure of performance. The score for episodic memory tasks result ranged between 15 and 64. It was observed that the bilinguals performed better than monolinguals by 5.29 points in episodic memory (Ljungberg, Hansson, Andrés, Josefsson & Nilsson, 2013). This trend in performance was replicated across all ages for both bilinguals and monolinguals. The participants between the ages 50 and 60 had the highest score in episodic memory in monolinguals. For bilinguals, the highest score in episodic memory was found in participants between the ages of 40 and 45. The lowest scores were registered by participants with advanced ages for both bilinguals and monolinguals. The study did not find any significance interaction between performance and age among bilinguals and monolinguals. The study drew its participants from a reliable Betula Cohort Study that was conducted for more than twenty years. The study used systematic sampling technique to recruit purposeful research the participants. The participants were screened for health issues before taking part in the study. By using a subset of carefully selected sample, the Ljungberg et al study can be said to be reliable. Besides, the use of standardized procedures and appropriate data analysis tool also boosted the reliability of the study. However, small sample size used presented difficulties in generalizing the findings to the human population. The findings of Ljungberg et al study add valuable literature to the issue episodic memory differences between monolinguals and bilinguals. The study established that the bilinguals outperformed monolinguals by 5.29 points in episodic memory differences. The findings can be used to solve memory problems in older adults by encouraging them to learn second languages.
References
Cardwell, M., & Flanagan, C. (2005). Psychology AS: The complete companion. Cheltenham: Nelson Thornes.
Heyes, C. M., & Huber, L. (2000). The evolution of cognition. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.
Ljungberg, J. K., Hansson, P., Andrés, P., Josefsson, M., & Nilsson, L. (2013). A longitudinal study of memory advantages in bilinguals. Plos ONE, 8(9), 1-8.
Morales, J., Calvo, A., & Bialystok, E. (2013). Working memory development in monolingual and bilingual children. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 114(2), 187-202
Nevid, J. S. (2013). Psychology: Concepts and applications. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Cengage Learning.
