BILINGUAL AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL MEMORY IN OLDER ADULT IMMIGRANTS - A TEST OF COGNITIVE EXPLANATIONS OF THE REMINISCENCE BUMP AND THE LINGUISTIC ENCODING OF MEMORIES

Twelve people who emigrated as adults from Spanish-speaking cultures a nd then spent at least 30 years in an Angle culture were asked to prov ide autobiographical memories to word cues. All communication was in S panish on one day and English on a second. In previous studies, there has been a bump or increase in autobiographical memories for the 10 to 30 decades. Here the increase in memories followed the age of immigra tion and settlement, supporting a cognitive theory of the reminiscence bump. The distributions of memories across the lifespan were similar for the Spanish sessions and the English sessions. Participants identi fied 20% of their memories as recalled internally in the language not being used that day. For this subset of memories, events prior to migr ation were more frequently recalled in Spanish, whereas events after m igration were more frequently recalled in English. (C) 1998 Academic P ress.