Kenosha student presents research at seventh annual Celebration of Scholars event

2017 May 2

Carthage College held the seventh annual Celebration of Scholars event on Friday, April 28, 2017. Celebration of Scholars is a poster exhibition that features original research, scholarship, and creative work completed by Carthage students.

Grace Reyes of Kenosha presented "The Effect of Priming on Memory Recall in Linguistically Unbalanced Bilinguals" at the event.

This is the project's abstract:

"This project examined the effect of priming on memory in linguistically unbalanced bilinguals. Previous bilingual research often focuses on word recognition tasks, so this study was designed to instead focus on word recall. Twenty students in four conditions were primed with an audio stimulus in either their first or second language. Next, they completed a memory task in either their first or second language. Following the prime and the task, participants were presented with a distraction task to impede the possibility of rehearsal. After the short distraction, participants were then asked to recall the words from the original list. There were no significant main effects on number of words remembered as a function of the prime language, or a combination of the prime and task language. The main effect on number of words recalled as a function of the language in which the task was presented approached significance. While not significantly so, memory recall was highest when both the prime and the memory task were presented in participants' first language, and lowest when primed in the first language but presented the memory task in the second language, as predicted."