Schedule of Events | Symposia

The Influence of Language Congruency on Narrative Recall in Bilingual Individuals

Poster Session E - Monday, March 31, 2025, 2:30 – 4:30 pm EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Veronica Foureaux-Lee¹ (l.veronica@wustl.edu), Angelique I. Delarazan¹, Zachariah M. Reagh¹; ¹Washington University in St. Louis

For multilingual individuals, the language used to encode and remember information provides an important source of context. However, research on the influence of language on memory is limited. Given that most of the world's population is multilingual, understanding these effects has important implications for language access in legal, clinical, and educational settings. This study investigated how recalling a narrative in the same versus a different language from encoding impacts the accuracy and detail with which the narrative is recalled. We additionally examined language-dependent effects on narrative recall both immediately and after a 24-hour delay. Native bilingual (Spanish-English) participants listened to eight stories divided into two equivalent blocks, with each block containing two stories in English and two in Spanish. Participants (N=21) then verbally recalled the stories either in the same or a different language, at an interval of 24 hours or immediately post-encoding. Findings demonstrated a greater vulnerability to memory changes for Spanish recall than English recall, with main effects of both retention interval and language condition. An effect of language condition was also observed for immediate recall in English. Additional exploratory analyses compared recall across individuals, and showed that participants’ recall was more semantically similar to each other than to the originally encoded story itself, suggesting a “shared narrative” phenomenon both within and across languages. These findings highlight a complex interplay between language and memory and demonstrate that language may impact memory differently depending on the retention interval.

Topic Area: LANGUAGE: Other