Bilingual autobiographical memory: Experimental studies and clinical cases

This paper argues that the consecutive bilingual's dual cultural-linguistic self-representations act as filters for memory retrieval of events from th e personal past. Examination of work in experimental psychology on bilingua l autobiographical memory and clinical case reports from psychoanalytic the rapy with bilinguals suggests that memory retrievals for events from childh ood and youth (in the country of origin) are more numerous, more detailed a nd more emotionally marked when remembering is done in the first language ( 'mother tongue') rather than in the second language. The mechanism accounti ng for this phenomenon has been identified as encoding specificity and stat e-dependent learning, where the bilingual's languages are considered the op erative 'states' at encoding and retrieval. The paper suggests that this no tion of 'states' be refined to include cultural-linguistic self-representat ions attending language socialization in first and second cultures. Such la nguage-specific self-representations act as linguistically mediated 'states ' that may or may not match similar states at encoding and thus account for qualitative and quantitative differences in retrieval.