Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

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.