Research with bilinguals may provide insights into the complex relationship between autobiographical memory and language. The present paper suggests existence of language-dependent memory, where linguistic factors at the time of recall influence memory retrieval. In two experiments, Russian-English bilingual immigrants were interviewed using the word-prompt technique. In the first experiment, bilinguals retrieved more autobiographical memories when there was a match between language of recall and language of encoding than when there was a mismatch. More memories from the period before immigration were recalled in Russian than in English and more memories from the United States were recalled in English than in Russian. To examine the mechanisms underlying these results, the ambiance language and the word-prompt language were considered separately in the second experiment. Both the linguistic ambiance and the word prompt were found to influence recall of autobiographical memories. These results, and particularly the effect of linguistic ambiance on recall, suggest language-dependent memory.

The traditional language switch hypothesis, according to which bihnguals can selectively activate and deactivate either language, has been repeatedly challenged in recent studies. In particular, an eyetracking experiment investigating spoken language processing suggests that bilinguals maintain both languages active in parallel even during monolingual input. The present study extends this finding to circumstances exhibiting between-language competition, within-language competition, or both. In this experiment, we find evidence for lexical items in the first language interfering with processing of the second language. We find that, in addition to competing activation between languages, bilinguals (like monolinguals) encounter competition within languages. Moreover, the results suggest that when simultaneous competition is encountered from items in both languages, within-language competition may be stronger than between-language competition. It appears that a bilingual's irrelevant language continues to be processed even when not actively used. However, this phenomenon is considerably influenced by language mode, even when such variables as word frequency, phonetic overlap, and language preference are taken into account.

Learning a new language involves significant vocabulary ac-quisition. Learners can accelerate this process by relying onwords with native-language overlap, such as cognates. Forbilingual third language learners, it is necessary to determinehow their two existing languages interact during novel lan-guage learning. A scaffolding account predicts transfer fromeither language for individual words, whereas an accumula-tion account predicts cumulative transfer from both languages.To compare these accounts, twenty English-German bilingualadults were taught an artificial language containing 48 novelwritten words that varied orthogonally in English and Germanwordlikeness (neighborhood size and orthotactic probability).Wordlikeness in each language improved word production ac-curacy, and similarity to one language provided the same bene-fit as dual-language overlap. In addition, participants’ memoryfor novel words was affected by the statistical distributions ofletters in the novel language. Results indicate that bilingualsutilize both languages during third language acquisition, sup-porting a scaffolding learning model.