Temporal dynamics of free recall: The role of rehearsal efficiency in word frequency and bilingual language proficiency effects.

Under a recall model in which presentations and rehearsals are treated as equivalent encoding events, we investigated whether rehearsal efficiency differences explain the effects of word frequency and bilingual proficiency on the temporal dynamics of rehearsal and free recall. Experiments 1 and 3 were conducted with monolingual English speakers, and Experiments 2 and 4 were conducted with Spanish-English bilinguals with matched age, education, and socioeconomic status. In Experiments 1 and 2, lower word frequency, lower proficiency, and bilingualism were associated with less accurate free recall of items from early serial positions, beginning recall with items from later serial positions, and making fewer transitions to items from later or adjacent serial positions.

The effects of bilingual language proficiency on recall accuracy and semantic clustering in free recall output: evidence for shared semantic associations across languages.

Two experiments investigated how well bilinguals utilise long-standing semantic associations to encode and retrieve semantic clusters in verbal episodic memory. In Experiment 1, Spanish-English bilinguals (N = 128) studied and recalled word and picture sets. Word recall was equivalent in L1 and L2, picture recall was better in L1 than in L2, and the picture superiority effect was stronger in L1 than in L2.