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Calliope Haritos
The relationship between languages in long-term memory is examined in bilingual English-Greek six, eight and ten year olds. Children heard two stories over the course of two days and were asked to recall information from the stories on the third day. Each story consisted of two events, a breakfast and a party, each in a different language. The role of presentation language (LP) was examined with respect to the amount of information remembered, storage/organisation of information, and retrieval. A 3(Grade) X 2(Event) X 2(LP) ANOVA with repeated measures on the last two factors produced main effects for Grade, Event, and LP, and a three-way interaction. Cluster analyses of recall indicated greater semantic/event clustering than language clustering. Comparison groups included a monolingual story group and a group of bilinguals who heard lists of words. Bilingual memory was superior to monolingual memory and story items were remembered better than items presented in word lists. Results are discussed within a developmental framework of bilingual memory that considers individual and contextual variables, including the cognitive and social demands of the retrieval task.
