Foreign Language Can Reduce False Memories

A thief enters a museum late at night. They walk by two statues—or were they suits of armor? You notice them taking a necklace. Or you can wait. Wasn’t it mentioned in the news that it was a watch? Our memories shape the past and our perception of reality. However, they are not always correct. Language is frequently blamed for implanting these misleading memories. Two UChicago research groups collaborated in a new study published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General to investigate the relationship between Foreign language and memory—specifically, the role of multilingualism.

It might be difficult to do anything in a language other than your own, from buying lunch to learning something new. This may lead some to conclude that those who speak a foreign language are more prone to false memories.

That, however, is not the case, according to Prof. Boaz Keysar.

“What’s really interesting about what we find is it’s exactly the opposite,” said Keysar, who directs the Multilingualism and Decision-Making Lab at UChicago. “People have fewer false memories in their second language.”

The researchers suggested that this was due to a higher amount of memory monitoring. Anyone who has struggled with a new language understands the mental effort required to avoid a linguistic blunder. Researchers believe this is due to the fact that you are utilizing a different method of reasoning, one that is less natural and instinctive.

“When you’re using a second language, it activates this mindset of being more careful with your judgments and your decision making,” said Prof. David Gallo, who leads the Memory Research Lab at UChicago. “You might not even be aware that you’re doing this.”

“This pushes back against the idea that, just because you’re using a foreign language it doesn’t mean every decision you make is going to be a worse one,” said lead author Leigh Grant, a psychology Ph.D. student who brought two UChicago research groups together.

There are two types of memory illusions

To put their concept to the test, researchers collaborated with the University of Chicago’s Center in Beijing on two investigations meant to implant fake memories. In the first study, 120 native Mandarin Chinese speakers who also spoke English were given a list of words with similar meanings in both languages.

Participants were given words like “dream,” “snooze,” “bed,” “rest,” and so on. The word “sleep” was crucially absent. This is what experts call a “lure,” a frequent word that has been purposefully missing to force your brain to fill in the obvious relationship. A ideal setting for creating a fake recollection.

“Everybody makes that kind of inference,” Gallo added. “I’m not sure if you said’sleep,’ or if you just imagined it.”

The participants were then asked to recall the terms they remembered and, more significantly, which related words they did not recall. This assessed how well people managed their memory.

“We found that people were less likely to falsely remember these missing words if they were presented in their secondary language compared to their native one,” Gallo said.

The second study investigated the impact of bilingualism in the misinformation effect, which occurs when your recollection of something is affected by information you learn later. This is especially important in eyewitness testimony, where contradicting reports can have disastrous results.

Native Mandarin speakers in the study saw silent videos of a crime. They then listened to similar audio narratives in English and Mandarin. The stories were loaded with details about the crime, some of which were accurate and some of which were not.

When asked what they remembered, participants succumbed to the planted false recollections in their native language. Suggestions for extra guards or statues turned out to be false memories. That was not the case with their second language.

“We actually found that when people got misleading information in their foreign language, they were more likely to catch it than when they got it in their native tongue,” Grant said.

The effect of a foreign language
Both experiments verified the team’s theory that when people use a second language, they pay closer attention to their memories. This foreign language impact has significant consequences for our understanding of the role of memory and language in legal, political, and everyday decision making.

“There are hundreds of millions of immigrants, refugees and people who live in a country that doesn’t speak their native tongue,” Keysar said. “Turns out, it actually improves their ability to tell false from true memory.”

Their findings also can help us understand whose information we trust and when. “These language effects can actually affect how we think about our own memories in a fundamental way,” Gallo said. “And influence whether you believe someone’s misinformation or not depending on what language they used.”

The next steps, researchers say, are to test other language combinations or further explore the relationship between visual and auditory information. “I feel like we’re at the tip of the iceberg here,” Gallo said.

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