The effect of bilingualism on lexical learning and memory across two language modalities: some evidence for a domain-specific, but not general, advantage

ABSTRACT

The present study was conducted to replicate bilingual advantages in short-term memory for language-like material and word learning in young adults and extend this research to the sign domain, ultimately with the goal of investigating the domain specificity of bilingual advantages in cognition. Data from 112 monolingual hearing non-signers and 78 bilingual hearing non-signers were analysed for this study. Participants completed a battery of tasks assessing sign and word learning, short-term memory, working memory capacity, intelligence, and a language and demographic questionnaire. Overall, the results of this study suggested a bilingual advantage in memory for speech-like material – no other advantage (or disadvantage) was found. Results are discussed within the context of recent large-scale experimental and meta-analytic studies that have failed to find bilingual advantages in domain-general abilities such as attention control and working memory capacity in young adults.

KEYWORDS:

• Bilingual advantage
• working memory capacity
• short-term memory
• sign language
• lexical learning

Acknowledgement

We would like to thank Maya Berinhout, Stephanie Blough, Lindsey Drummond, Morgan Foreman, Skyler Tordoya-Henckell, Kevaghn Hinckley, Sidni Vaughn Justus, Rachel Monahan, Elizabeth Pierotti, and Angelique Soulakos for their support on various aspects of this project. We would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

David Martinez http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8265-3862

Notes

1 We thank an anonymous reviewer for this suggestion.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by National Science Foundation award [#1651115]; Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences.