Oh wow, it’s been a while! Haven’t wrote much reviews since summer started.

I was browsing the online journal of neuroscience ; nothing really sparks my interest to write any further discussion, all were small facts that doesn’t concern most people (probably except me). American journal of psychology is usually more captivating to the public. Today lets talk about false memory and bilinguals. (I am not going to put any reference to this discussion, if you are going to complain about it please kindly close the window)

False memory had always been a fascinating topic in the psy field, whether its general social psychology or behavioral psychology; even lawyers who knows nothing about science has a certain understanding of this topic. Here is our article: False memory in bilinguals: Does switching languages increase false memories? by Marmolejo G; Diliberto-Macaluso KA; Altarriba JE. Critical topic for us international students, as well as for every single student who learn in english. Our native language being Cantonese (chinese) and learning in english – what are the essential factors and limitations that might have kept us from learning in english?

Abstract:
“People often receive and recount information in different languages. This experiment examined the impact of switching languages on false recall, recognition, and recognition confidence. We presented Spanish–English bilinguals with 10 lists of words associated to a critical nonpresented lure, either in English or in Spanish. Each list was followed by free recall either in English or in Spanish. The final stage was a recognition test in either language. Results showed a higher proportion of veridical and false recall in English, the more dominant language, than in Spanish, the native language. Noncritical intrusions were equivalent in both languages. More importantly, false recall, false recognition, and false recognition confidence were higher across languages than within languages. The results are examined in relation to current research and interpretations of bilingual false memory.”

Pop pop, second article right off google while doing my little research
Development of false memories in bilingual children and adults

Both experiment concluded that bilinguals have a more detrimental false memories effect in between-languages conditions (ie English VS. Spanish) when compared to within-language conditions.This is interesting, on the contrary of what I first hypothesize, we are more likely to complicate ourselves when recounting information in our native languages. (Ehh… I need to write an extra paragraph criticizing myself for not being scientific…)

My first insight was based on social outgroup homogentity effect; presumably, we have rather limited exposure on our second language compared to our native – and the outgroup (ie foreign language) is more distinguishable relative to our ingroup (ie native language). And hence we are less likely to create false memory when encountering a more discriminated language as much effort and attention is required to interpret a particular event. Making logic?…. This social psychology approach was a total fallacy, we name what I just did an illusory correlation; ignoring the variables and drawing assumptions one after another to create an erroreous belief. Meh, it was just an hypothesis.

Back to topic, I am not going to review the procedures and materials being used in the experiments, they were all well summarized in the abstracts. All we are concern here are the results and how does it impacts our education. As forementioned, false recognition tends to increase  in between language conditions regardless of age in all cases, and the rate seems to increase with respect to the dominance of the participant’s native language.  Clearly, this phenomenon applies to me and all other chinese who are learning in english. I am going to operationally define rate of false memory(recognition) as items being recalled incorrectly. According to my reliable associative memory, international students from faculty of science does poorly in fill in the blank sections compared to native students (english speaking students).

1) presumably, we lack the fluency of english relatively, less language choice availability should suggest a more poor performance in written section.

2) the big fact here, we are not able to recall items as efficient as the native english speakers (ie increased rate of false memory).

3)We tend to remember new vocabularies, particularly scientific terms in an more abstracted form for example images, associations with other abstract terms. (ie meningomyelocele, a type of spinal bifida… I can’t even pronounced it) And again because of  the very limited availability heuristics, take away all the complex neuromechanisms – the memory is not stored as “intact” when english is considered a foreign language.

The experiments also suggested the dominance of native language correlates the rate of false memory in participants.  What does it infer? Let’s take a step back, look at the issue in an opposite direction and draw a straight line to our final conclusion. To Avoid this natural disadvantage for us the non-native english speakers, we must increase our fluency in english. See my drift? Lesser dominance, lesser false recalls, as a matter of fact this old saying had been explained scientifically.

“Psychology is common sense, but being termed, organized, and explained.”