Eyewitness memory in late bilinguals: Evidence for discursive relativity

Abstract

Loftus and Palmer's(1974) ingenious experiments convincingly demonstrated that linguistic changes in the verbal framing of questions result in changes in eyewitness testimonies. Their findings have inspired a new line of research investigating the relationship between language and eyewitness memory. The present study expands the focus of inquiry to bilingual individuals and examines ways in which cross-linguistic differences—and second language learning in adulthood—may influence the participants' performance on memory tasks involving visual recall. The results demonstrate that in instances where availability—or lack—of certain lexically encoded concepts led to differences in narratives elicited from monolingual speakers of Russian and American English, there were also differences between the two bilingual groups. Russians who learned English as a foreign language patterned with monolingual Russians in their recall, while Russians who learned English as a second language used additional interpretive frames, privacy and personal space, available in English but not in Russian. The discussion examines these results from the perspective of discursive relativity, suggesting directions for further study of the relationship between bilingualism, memory, and cognition.