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Bilingual memory


Bilingualism is the regular use of two fluent languages, and bilinguals are those individuals who need and use two (or more) languages in their everyday lives. A person's bilingual memories are heavily dependent on the person's fluency, the age the second language was acquired, and high language proficiency to both languages. High proficiency provides mental flexibility across all domains of thought and forces them to adopt strategies that accelerate cognitive development. People who are bilingual integrate and organize the information of two languages, which creates advantages in terms of many cognitive abilities, such as intelligence, creativity, analogical reasoning, classification skills, problem solving, learning strategies, and thinking flexibility.

One of the first researchers on the subject of bilingual memory and representation was linguist Uriel Weinreich. Languages in Contact, an essay published by Weinreich in 1953, proposed a model of bilingual memory organization that made the theoretical distinction between the lexical and conceptual level of representation. Three different types of organizational models were proposed: coordinate, compound, and subordinate, each having a different relationship between the lexical and conceptual levels of representation. In 1954, Ervin and Osgood reformulated Weinreich's compound-coordinate representational model and placed further emphasis on the context of language learning, similar to the encoding specificity principle later proposed by Tulving in the 1970s. In 1984, Potter et al. proposed the hierarchical model of bilingual memory, consisting of two memory structures, the word association model and concept mediation model. The word association model proposes a link between languages at the lexical level while the concept mediation model proposes a direct link between the conceptual representation and the lexical representation in each language. The hierarchical model was later revised by Kroll and Stewart in 1994 to account for linguistic proficiency and direction of translation, since then it has been re-revised.

One of the processes involved in analyzing which neural regions of the brain are involved in bilingual memory is a subtraction method. Researchers compare what has been impaired with what is functioning regularly. This contrast between the destroyed and intact regions of the brain, aids researchers in discovering the components of language processing. It has been found that under typical circumstances, when multiple languages are lost at the same time, they are usually regained in the same fashion. It is therefore presumed that areas of the brain, which are responsible for processing language, are potentially the same. There have been examples of cases where languages have been restored prior to one another and to a greater degree, but this is fairly uncommon. The techniques allowing researchers to observe brain activity in multilingual patients are conducted whilst the subject is simultaneously performing and processing a language. Research has proposed that the entire production and comprehension of language is most likely regulated and managed by neural pools, whose stations of communication are in the cortical and subcortical regions. It has been shown that there are no grounds on which to assume the existence of distinct cerebral organization of separate languages in the bilingual brain. That is to say, the cerebral regions that are engaged for both languages are the same. Although neurologists have a basic understanding of the underlying neural components and mechanisms of bilingual language, further research is necessary in order to fully understand or conclude any other findings.


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