Bilingualism and Bicodalism

Abstract

Bilingual subjects were presented with long lists of words which they subsequently tried to recall. On some lists the words appeared in red or in black; on other lists, they appeared in French or in English. On mixed lists, words appeared both in red and in black, or both in French and in English, but no word appeared in two colours or was translated. The main finding was that only about half as many words were recalled from the list with respect to colour (arbitrary code) as were recalled from the linguistically mixed list. A distinction is thus made experimentally between arbitrary and well-formed coding systems, as they affect short-term memory.