Automaticity and interference in bilinguals

Summary In an experimental study with 40 English-German and 40 German-Swedish bilingual high school students, automaticity and interference were analyzed on the basis of Shiffrin and Schneider's theory of controlled and automatic processing. Confirming the assumptions inferred from the theory, dominant bilinguals reacted significantly faster to pictured objects in their dominant language than did balanced bilinguals in either of their two languages. Interaction effects with frequency indicated less experience with rare words in the balanced groups. Matched on the basis of reaction time scores, the balanced groups continued to show a higher error rate in recall, but not in recognition when compared with the dominant groups. It was concluded that training alone could not account for the differences in recall. A congenitally determined mental speed factor was suggested for which the theory makes no direct commitment. The strong interrelation between automaticity and interference was shown; their significance for bilinguals in highly speeded and unstructured tasks was also shown. The results reveal high cross-cultural consistency.An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 3rd Nordic Symposium on Bilingualism, held in Umea, Sweden, June 4 to 5, 1980     

Need for achievement,career mobility,and the Mexican-American college graduate

Need for achievement and career mobility were measured for 111 Mexican-American college graduates. Those with a moderate need for achievement were found to have the highest upward mobility. Those with either a high or low need for achievement had lower mobility. The implications of this finding are discussed.     

Arithmetical calculations in monolinguals and bilinguals

Summary A series of 240 arithmetical problems requiring one, two, or three operations of the same kind were presented to 32 German-Swedish bilingual and 14 German dominant subjects in the age range 14–19 years. The results provide evidence that language has an important effect on arithmetical performance, affecting latencies and error rates. Generally the bilingual subjects needed more time to perform the tasks and made more errors than the monolingual subjects. The results are tentatively explained by retrieval interference and decay of memory trace and support an interdependence hypothesis of bilingual organization in memory.This research was supported by a grant from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences     

Acoustical determinants of the “neurotic pattern” in rats

The Psychological Record - The experiments reported in the present paper show that the peculiar behavior called the “neurotic pattern” by Maier is dependent upon the intensity and the...     

Development of intra- and interlingual interference in bilinguals

Developmental changes in intra- and interlingual interference were followed in 74 German-Swedish bilingual and 15 trilingual subjects using Stroop tasks for vision. The results provide evidence that the differential pattern of interference is mainly determined by language usage. Intra- and interlingual interference follow language dominance patterns in an everchanging process; hence, it is the point of measurement that determines whether equivalent or different amounts of interference are obtained. Stimuli characteristics determine points of language balance but are—like cognitive capabilities—of minor importance for the differential pattern of interference. Stroop task performance cannot be taken as evidence for or against the interdependence hypothesis of bilingual storage, since the Stroop situation does not permit one language to be turned off. Prolonged response times in multilinguals, found in this study, are more congruent with the interdependence hypothesis. By providing this developmental perspective, the current findings can explain previous contradictory results.This research was supported by the Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation. It was reported in a paper presented at the 3rd International Conference on Psycholinguistics and Foreign Language Learning, Åbo, Finland, October 25–6, 1982.