Bilingualism and reading difficulties: an exploration in episodic and semantic memory

ABSTRACT

This study was designed to investigate the effect of bilingualism and reading difficulties (RD) on episodic and semantic memory. The subjects included 190 children (aged 9–12 years): 45 Iranian-Swedish bilinguals and 59 Swedish monolinguals with typically developed reading, along with 41 bilinguals and 45 monolinguals with RD. To measure episodic memory, subject-performed and verbal tasks were used for encoding, and both free and cued recall were used for retrieval. Letter and category fluency tasks were used to test semantic memory. In action memory, bilingual children with RD benefited less from enactment encoding form compared to children with typically developed reading. Additionally, bilingual with RD had lower rates of recollection in category fluency compared to their monolingual counterparts. However, in letter fluency, there was not found a difference between performances of bilinguals and monolinguals with RD. We discuss the involvement of long-term memory in both bilingualism and reading.

KEYWORDS:

• Bilingualism
• reading difficulties
• typically developed reading
• episodic memory
• semantic memory

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank all children who participated as well as the parents and teachers who supported them in this study. They are also grateful to Dr. Sadegheh Moniri for her nice comments on the earlier draft of the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 An important paradigm in the study of episodic memory is the subject-perform task (SPT) compared with the verbal task (VT). Typically, participants are asked to perform a list of mini commands (with either real or imaginary objects) while encoding SPTs and then to verbally repeat lists of action phrases while encoding VTs.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Swedish Research Council (Vetenskaprådet) under grant [421-2009-1349].