The International Journal of Bilingualism 257 Multilingualism and the sociolinguistic gender paradox Eyewitness memory in late bilinguals: Evidence for discursive relativity* Aneta Pavlenko Temple University Acknowledgments* The research discussed in this paper was supportedby the Grant-in-Aidof Research from Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Society;President’s Council of Cornell Women Research Grant; Cornell University Summer Cognitive Studies Research Fellowship; and Cornell University Cognitive Studies Research and Travel grants. At different stages, the paper has benefitted tremen- dously from insightful comments offered by Jean-Marc Dewaele, Scott Jarvis, Eric Kellerman, and Bob Schrauf,as well as from discussions with Slava Paperno, Tatyana Pyntikova,Uliana Stoliarova, and Sanna Tsivkin. All remaining errors or inaccuracies are strictly my own. Abstract Loftus and Palmer’s (1974) ingenious experiments convincingly demon- strated that linguistic changes in the verbal framing of questions result in changes in eyewitness testimonies. Their findings have inspired a new line of research investigating the relationship between language and eyewit- ness memory. The present study expands the focus of inquiry to bilingual individualsand examinesways in which cross-linguistic differences—and second language learning in adulthood—may influence the participants’ performanceon memory tasks involving visual recall. The results demon- strate that in instances where availability—or lack—of certain lexically encoded concepts led to differences in narratives elicited from monolingual speakersof Russian andAmericanEnglish, there were also differencesbetween the two bilingual groups. Russians who learned English as a foreign languagepatternedwith monolingualRussians in their recall, while Russians who learned English as a second language used additional inter- pretive frames, privacy and personal space, available in English but not in Russian. The discussion examines these results from the perspective of discursive relativity, suggesting directions for further study of the relationshipbetween bilingualism, memory, and cognition. 1 Introduction In a series of ground-breaking studies, Loftus and Palmer (1974) showed participants several films portraying car accidents and then elicited recalls through differentially worded questionnaires. They found that the form of a question, in their case a change of a single word, can markedly and consistently affect a witness’ answer to that question. In partic- ular, the question “About how fast were the cars going when they smashed into each other?” elicited higher estimates of speed than questions that used the verbs collided, Address for correspondence Volume 7  Number 3  2003, 257– 281 CITE Department, College of Education, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA19122, U.S.A.; e-mail: <apavlenk@ temple.edu >. Key words eyewitness memory linguistic relativity Russian-English bilingualism at TEMPLE UNIV on May 8, 2016 ijb.sagepub.com Downloaded from