Speakers of different languages remember visual scenes differently

Matias Fernandez-Duque*, Sayuri Lynn Hayakawa, Viorica Marian

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

5 Scopus citations

Abstract

Language can have a powerful effect on how people experience events. Here, we examine how the languages people speak guide attention and influence what they remember from a visual scene. When hearing a word, listeners activate other similar-sounding words before settling on the correct target. We tested whether this linguistic coactivation during a visual search task changes memory for objects. Bilinguals and monolinguals remembered English competitor words that overlapped phonologically with a spoken English target better than control objects without name overlap. High Spanish proficiency also enhanced memory for Spanish competitors that overlapped across languages. We conclude that linguistic diversity partly accounts for differences in higher cognitive functions such as memory, with multilinguals providing a fertile ground for studying the interaction between language and cognition.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Article numbereadh0064
JournalScience Advances
Volume9
Issue number33
DOIs
StatePublished - Aug 2023

Funding

Acknowledgments: W e thank the participants of this study and the members of the Bilingualism and Psycholinguistics Research Group for invaluable feedback. Funding: Research reported in this manuscript was supported by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development of the National Institutes of Health under A ward Number R01HD059858 to V .M.. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health. Author contributions: Conceptualization: M.F .-D. and V .M. Data curation: M.F .-D. Formal analysis: M.F .-D. and S.H. Funding acquisition: V .M. Investigation: M.F .-D. Visualization: M.F .-D. Project administration: M.F .-D. and V .M. Supervision: V .M. and S.H. Writing: M.F .-D., S.H., and V .M. Competing interests: The authors declare that they hav e no competing interests. Data and materials availability: All data needed to evaluate the conclusions in the paper are present in the paper, the Supplementary Materials, and the online Dryad repository (https://doi.org/10. 5061/dryad.q83bk3jpd).

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • General

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