Phonological and visual short-term memory codification in English-Mandarin bilinguals

Abstract

The first objective of the present study is to assess the extent to which phonological and visual codes are used for representing Chinese words in STM among English-Mandarin bilinguals. The second objective is to explore any differences between bilinguals with different language dominance in the use of these STM codes for Chinese. The experiments manipulated phonological and visual features of words and examined their influence on the degree of semantic PI in a short-term cued recall task. Mixed and English dominant bilinguals showed evidence of phonological influence on PI, implicating phonological codification. There was also evidence of visual influences on PI for English dominant bilinguals, implicating visual codification. Mandarin dominant bilinguals did not show any evidence of phonological or visual influences on semantic PI, which may suggest that they have a very integrated phonological, visual and semantic memory system.