MEMORY, LANGUAGE, CULTURE

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Description (adapted from investigator's abstract): A common anecdotal report of older adults is that they remember events that occurred when they were younger better than more recent events. When this reversal of a normal monotonic retention function is examined carefully, either by asking for life stories or by curing individual autobiographical memories with words, older adults do indeed remember more events from when they were 10 to 30 years old. This "bump" phenomenon is one of the few cognitive effects of aging that is not a decrement in performance. It has many explanations that have resisted being teased apart using standard techniques of cognitive psychology. However, by examining people who migrated at various points in their lives, changing language, culture, and environment, we propose to separate classes of explanations. A central aspect of autobiographical memory is language, yet little work has examined whether memory, or discourse of any kind, is easier to retrieve in the language in which it was encoded. Yet a few studies with young adults, clinical data from psychotherapeutic treatment, and the introspections of older bilinguals indicate that it is. By examining the memories of people who migrated and learned a second language at different times (and those who did not migrate or learned both languages simultaneously, or know only one language), we can examine such questions. Since many older adults are bilinguals who have changed their relative competence in their languages over their lifespans, and even more have made major migrations, this work has practical as well as theoretical interest for the nature of language and memory in adult development. Tasks include a narrative and a word-cued autobiographical memory procedure, and a bilingual language assessment. Participant populations recruited to help separate effects include adult Hispanics who migrated to either Anglo or Hispanic communities in the US, Poles who were granted asylum in Denmark, monolingual non-migrating matched controls, and older monolingual adults who migrated within the US to non-retirement communities, age segregated retirement communities, and long-term care facilities.