This Article Full Text (PDF) References Alert me when this article is cited Alert me if a correction is posted Services Email this article to a friend Similar articles in this journal Alert me to new issues of the journal Add to Saved Citations Download to citation manager Request Permissions Request Reprints Add to My Marked Citations Citing Articles Citing Articles via Google Scholar Google Scholar Articles by Schrauf, R. W. Search for Related Content Social Bookmarking                   What's this?

Bilingual Autobiographical Memory: Experimental Studies and Clinical Cases

Northwestern University, USA

This paper argues that the consecutive bilingual’s dual cultural-linguistic self-representations act as filters for memory retrieval of events from the personal past. Examination of work in experimental psychology on bilingual autobiographical memory and clinical case reports from psychoanalytic therapy with bilinguals suggests that memory retrievals for events from childhood and youth (in the country of origin) are more numerous, more detailed and more emotionally marked when remembering is done in the first language (‘mother tongue’) rather than in the second language. The mechanism accounting for this phenomenon has been identified as encoding specificity and state-dependent learning, where the bilingual’s languages are considered the operative ‘states’ at encoding and retrieval. The paper suggests that this notion of ‘states’ be refined to include cultural-linguistic self-representations attending language socialization in first and second cultures. Such language-specific self-representations act as linguistically mediated ‘states’ that may or may not match similar states at encoding and thus account for qualitative and quantitative differences in retrieval.

Key Words: acculturation • bilingual memory • self and culture

CiteULike    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    What's this?