Evidence for a limited bilingual advantage in phonological short-term memory,but not lexical access and verbal and short-term working memory,skills in older bilingual adults

Abstract

Aims and objectives:

The aim of our study was to investigate the possible differences between verbal short-term and working memory, and long-term memory access in older bilingual and monolingual individuals.

Methodology:

The participants completed a questionnaire, which included a self-assessment of L2 knowledge, and a series of psychological tests, assessing nonverbal intelligence and verbal memory. The tests were administered individually.

Data and analysis:

Sixty-five native speakers of Polish, 38 (58.46%) bilingual, 53 (81.54%) female, aged between 60 and 69 years (M_age = 64 years), participated in our study. All participants resided and worked in Poland, thus shared a cultural background, non-immigrant status, and a dominant language (Polish). Moreover, the bilingual and the monolingual groups were matched for gender, age, intelligence, and educational level – all were university graduates with a master’s degree, bilinguals in their L2, monolinguals – not in L2.

Findings:

We found no differences between the bilingual and the monolingual group in semantic and phonemic verbal fluency (the participants employed similar strategies to access and search through their mental lexicons), verbal short-term and working memory, and rapid automatized naming. The only skill in which the bilinguals outperformed the monolinguals was phonological short-term memory.

Originality:

We examined a rarely studied group: professional sequential bilinguals, who used L2 at work, while L1 in daily life. All our participants spoke the same L1, had the same migrant status, and had comparable social and cultural experiences, all factors potentially influencing the scores. We also examined rapid automatized naming and phonological short-term memory, which, to our knowledge, had not been previously investigated in older bilinguals.

Significance:

Our findings provide further evidence for no bilingual advantage (or disadvantage) in verbal processing in older adults, as, despite using several verbal tasks, we found only one, narrow difference between the groups.