Did you see that? False memories for emotional words in bilingual children
Open Access
- 17 December 2021
- journal article
- research article
- Published by Cambridge University Press (CUP) in Bilingualism: Language and Cognition
- Vol. 25 (3), 498-510
- https://doi.org/10.1017/s136672892100105x
Abstract
When participants process a list of semantically strongly related words, the ones that were not presented may later be said, falsely, to have been on the list. This ‘false memory effect’ has been investigated by means of the DRM paradigm. We applied an emotional version of it to assess the false memory effect for emotional words in bilingual children with a minority language as L1 (their mother tongue) and a monolingual control group. We found that the higher emotionality of the words enhances memory distortion for both the bilingual and the monolingual children, in spite of the disadvantage related to vocabulary skills and of the socioeconomic status that acts on semantic processing independently from the condition of bilingualism. We conclude that bilingual children develop their semantic knowledge separately from their vocabulary skills and parallel to their monolingual peers, with a comparable role played by Arousal and Valence.Keywords
This publication has 84 references indexed in Scilit:
- Memory distortion: an adaptive perspectiveTrends in Cognitive Sciences, 2011
- Binding in visual working memory: The role of the episodic bufferNeuropsychologia, 2011
- Developmental reversals in false memory: Effects of emotional valence and arousalJournal of Experimental Child Psychology, 2010
- Valence and the development of immediate and long-term false memory illusionsMemory, 2010
- False memories: What the hell are they for?Applied Cognitive Psychology, 2009
- An associative-activation theory of children’s and adults’ memory illusionsJournal of Memory and Language, 2009
- Development of false memories in bilingual children and adultsJournal of Memory and Language, 2008
- False Memory for Categorized Pictures and Words: The Category Associates Procedure for Studying Memory Errors in Children and AdultsJournal of Memory and Language, 2000
- Emotionality in free recall: Language specificity in bilingual memoryCognition and Emotion, 1994
- Abstracts of Lectures on the Psychology of Testimony and on the Study of IndividualityThe American Journal of Psychology, 1910