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