Antón, E.; Duñabeitia, J.A. ¡Hola! Nice to Meet You: Language Mixing and Biographical Information Processing. Brain Sci.2021, 11, 703.
Antón, E.; Duñabeitia, J.A. ¡Hola! Nice to Meet You: Language Mixing and Biographical Information Processing. Brain Sci. 2021, 11, 703.
Antón, E.; Duñabeitia, J.A. ¡Hola! Nice to Meet You: Language Mixing and Biographical Information Processing. Brain Sci.2021, 11, 703.
Antón, E.; Duñabeitia, J.A. ¡Hola! Nice to Meet You: Language Mixing and Biographical Information Processing. Brain Sci. 2021, 11, 703.
Abstract
In bilingual communities, social interactions take place in both single- and mixed-language con-texts. Some of the information shared in multilingual conversations is often required in conse-quent social encounters, like interlocutors’ personal information. In this study we explored whether the autobiographical information provided in a single-language context is better re-membered than in an equivalent mixed-language situation. More than 400 Basque-Spanish bilin-gual (pre-)teenagers were presented with new persons who introduced themselves by either using only Spanish or only Basque, or by inter-sententially mixing both languages. Different memory measures were collected immediately after the initial exposure to the new pieces of information (immediate recall and recognition) and on the day after (delayed recall and recognition). In none of the time points was the information provided in a mixed-language fashion worse remembered than that provided in a strict one-language context. Interestingly, the variability across partici-pants in their sociodemographic and linguistic variables had a negligible impact on the effects. These results are discussed considering their social and educational implications for bilingual communities.
Keywords
language mixing; code-switching; multilingual learning; bilingual schooling
Subject
BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES, Applied Psychology
Copyright:
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.