Analogical transfer of problem solutions within and between languages in Spanish-English bilinguals

Previous cognitive research on transfer of learning in bilingual participan ts has used simple tasks such as word learning. In the present study, an an alogical transfer paradigm was used to examine transfer of high-level conce ptual information between languages. Experiment 1 examined analogical trans fer from a single source story to a target problem in the same or in a diff erent language with Spanish-English bilinguals. Experiment 2 exploited the competitive nature of retrieval in analogical transfer using a more sensiti ve design in which the target problem was preceded by two source analogs su ggesting different solutions. Even with a total of 207 participants across the two experiments, transfer was not significantly or substantially affect ed by the match or mismatch between the languages of the source and target problems. However, in Experiment 2, the competition between alternative sou rce analogs was greater when the languages of the two analogs matched than when they mismatched. These experiments show that the aspects of memory rep resentations important for higher-order processes such as analogical transf er are primarily language-general and that language-specific features play only a minor role when retrieving and applying information relevant to prob lem-solving. (C) 1999 Academic Press.