Department of Experimental Psychology, Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium.
Q J Exp Psychol (Hove). 2020 Jun;73(6):891-907. doi: 10.1177/1747021820910694. Epub 2020 Mar 19.
With academic internationalisation at full speed, English is increasingly used as a medium of instruction in higher education. The question arises of whether unbalanced bilinguals remember study materials in a non-native language (L2) as well as in a first language (L1). In previous studies, we found a disadvantage for students recalling short, expository texts in L2 compared with L1, but no such disadvantage for a true/false recognition test, not even on delayed tests after a month. As no additional forgetting occurs, the quality of the memory trace seems to be equally strong in both languages and the recall cost might be caused by a lack of production skill in L2. To test this hypothesis, we ran experiments in L1-L1, L2-L1, and L2-L2 conditions with free and cued recall (short open questions). We replicate the L2 free recall cost reported earlier and show that it is due to the encoding in L2 rather than to an L2 production cost. In contrast, we found no significant difference in a new pair of texts with short, cued recall questions, though there was a trend in the expected direction. A summary of the effect sizes obtained so far shows a considerable variety in magnitudes (with rather big confidence intervals), suggesting that the cost of studying in L2 depends on several factors such as study time, test requirement, and language proficiency level.
随着学术的国际化进程加速，英语越来越多地被用作高等教育的教学媒介。由此产生了一个问题，即不平衡双语者是否能像母语（L1）一样，记住非母语（L2）的学习材料。在之前的研究中，我们发现与 L1 相比，学生在 L2 中回忆简短说明性文本时存在劣势，但在真实/错误识别测试中却没有这种劣势，即使在一个月后的延迟测试中也没有。由于没有额外的遗忘发生，两种语言的记忆痕迹质量似乎同样强，而回忆成本可能是由于 L2 缺乏生产技能造成的。为了验证这一假设，我们在 L1-L1、L2-L1 和 L2-L2 条件下进行了自由和提示回忆（简短的开放性问题）实验。我们复制了之前报告的 L2 自由回忆成本，并表明这是由于 L2 的编码造成的，而不是由于 L2 的生产成本造成的。相比之下，我们在一组新的具有简短提示回忆问题的文本中没有发现显著差异，尽管有一个符合预期方向的趋势。迄今为止获得的效应量总结表明，其大小差异很大（置信区间相当大），这表明在 L2 学习的成本取决于学习时间、测试要求和语言熟练程度等几个因素。
