Working Memory Performance in Multilinguals

Abstract

Memory and language in humans are two of the most important cognitive functions. Working memory is an active storage system which is crucial for Multilanguage learning. There are studies highlighting the importance of working memory in learning a second language (Ardila, 2003). The primacy and recency effect or the serial positions effects have often been incorporated to study working memory. The present study was aimed to evaluate the recalling abilities in multilinguals and the serial positioning effect in multilinguals. Fifteen multilinguals whose first, second and third languages which are Marathi, Hindi and English respectively were selected for the study. The stimuli consisted of six lists of non-standardized sentences, each list consisting of 10 Marathi sentences which were translated to English and Hindi languages. Participants were given 200 seconds to read the list and 300 seconds to retrieve it in the written mode. The results indicated multilinguals showing superior recency effect over primacy effect while retrieving the serially positioned multilanguage sentences in which they were proficient in. Since India is a multilingual and multicultural country, researches regarding multilingual performances across the languages would help speech language pathologists to better understand and thus to efficiently decide the treatment plans for their polyglot clients.