JOURNAL OF MEMORY AND LANGUAGE 26, 392-405 (1987) Memory in a Monolingual Mode: When Are Bilinguals at a Disadvantage? SARAH ELLENRANSDELLAND IRA FISCHLER University of Florida Comparisons of bilinguals and monolinguals have typically found poorer performance by bilinguals in a variety of memory tasks. However, these studies have used bilinguals who were not native speakers of the monolingual’s language, and who were often required to process both languages during the session. In the present study, Native English-speaking bilinguals were compared to English monolinguals on four verbal memory tasks: episodic recognition, lexical decision, object naming, and free recall. Only English words were used in the session to avoid activation of the second language. There were no differences in accuracy between groups on any task. Bilinguals were slower than monolinguals, but only for the list recognition and lexical decision tasks, where language-specific, data-driven pro- CeSSing predominates. 0 1987 Academic Press. Inc. Psycholinguists have long been inter- ested in how a bilingual individual coordi- nates two languages that describe a single world, and how individuals who know and use two languages differ from those knowing only one language. Is there a cog- nitive advantage to possessing two or more alternative verbal codes? A second lan- guage, for example, may provide additional paths for retrieval of information from memory and encourage more diverse and creative thought. If two language systems are interdependent, there may also be con- ditions in which the bilingual is at a disad- vantage. Learning a Spanish name for an object could slow retrieval of the object’s English name, for example, in a way analo- gous to “fanning” effects within a language (e.g., Lewis & Anderson, 1976). Another possibility is that the two language systems are isolated and independent. These possible outcomes have been known as the interdependence vs indepen- dence views of bilingualism, respectively Send correspondence, including requests for re- prints, to Sarah Ransdell, Psychology Department, University of Maine, Orono, ME 00469. (e.g., McCormack, 1977). As with many di- chotomies, the extreme positions have been rejected as simplistic, and most recent work has been concerned with the partic- ular conditions under which the two lan- guages interact in performance and the ex- tent of this interaction (e.g., Grosjean, in press; Snodgrass, 1984). The present study compared English monolinguals with na- tive English bilinguals on a series of tasks involving retrieval of English words. Some studies comparing bilinguals and monolinguals in the monolingual’s language have found no differences in performance. For example, Soares and Grosjean (1984) reported equivalent lexical decision la- tencies to English words for English mono- linguals and English-Portuguese bilinguals. More typically, bilinguals are at a disad- vantage. Recent demonstrations of this dis- advantage include phoneme detection in auditorily presented sentences (Blair & Harris, 1981), speed of rejection of non- words in English which conform ortho- graphically or phonologically to words in the second language (e.g., Altenberg & Cairns, 1983; Nas, 1983; Soares & Gros- jean, 1984), and classification of multidi- 392 0749-596X/87 $3.00 Copyright 0 1987 by Academic Press. Inc. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.