Bilingual Memory of Greek-English Bilinguals

Abstract

Two models have been proposed to explain memory storage in bilinguals. The “independence” model holds that there are two distinct semantic memories, one for each of the bilingual's two languages, while the “interdependence” model supports a unified semantic memory common to both languages. These two hypotheses were contrasted by testing 21 adult English-Greek bilinguals grouped by dominant language (English-dominant, Greek-dominant, or balanced bilinguals). Subjects were given sequentially 3 passages of instructions (in English, in Greek, and in both languages) and were asked to form either English or Greek words, as they preferred, from a list of 25 CVC trigrams. The trigrams were constructed with common letters from the English and the Greek alphabets. Results indicated coding of instructions without language tag and similar performance under any language of instruction. The findings support a common semantic memory for the two languages, i.e., the interdependence model. Limitations of previous studies of bilinguals are discussed, and generalizations are limited to English-Greek bilinguals under the specific task employed.