Does bilingualism help memory? Competing effects of verbal ability and executive control Zofia Wodniecka a *, Fergus I.M. Craik b , Lin Luo c and Ellen Bialystok c a Institute of Psychology, Jagiellonian University, Krakow, Poland; b Rotman Research Institute, Toronto, ON, Canada; c Department of Psychology, York University, Toronto, ON, Canada (Received 17 February 2009; final version received 10 December 2009) Two studies are reported that explore the effect of bilingualism on memory performance. Following previous reports of a bilingual advantage in executive control that sometimes shows a greater advantage in older adults, we compared younger and older monolinguals and bilinguals on a memory paradigm that yielded separate measures of familiarity and recollection. As expected, there were no consistent effects in familiarity, but there were age and language differences in recollection, a measure reflecting executive control. Younger adultswere superior to older adults on this measure, but there was minimal support for a bilingual advantage in the younger group. Older bilingual adults did show such an advantage, especially on non-verbal tasks. The results provide some initial evidence for the interrelations among processing abilities, types of material, bilingualism, and aging in assessments of memory performance. Keywords: bilingualism; memory; executive control; aging Recent findings indicate that bilingualism confers an important cognitive benefit that leads to enhanced levels of executive control in both children’s development (e.g. Bialystok 1999, 2010; Bialystok and Shapero 2005; Carlson and Meltzoff 2008; Martin-Rhee and Bialystok 2008) and throughout adulthood and aging (e.g. Bialystok et al. 2004; Bialystok, Craik, and Ryan 2006; Colzato et al. 2008; Costa, Herna ´ndez, and Sebastia ´n-Galle ´s 2008). This advantage has been reported mostly in attentional tasks that require the resolution of conflicting information in the visual field (e.g. Simon task, Stroop task, ANT task), although other tasks have sometimes been used (e.g. Bialystok, Craik, and Luk 2008a, 2008b; Bialystok and Feng 2009). This conflict resolution is carried out by the component processes of executive control. Executive control is required for all forms of higher thought, including the memory procedures used in everyday cognition  attending to ongoing streams of information, processing materials appropriately, ignoring interference, and deploying effective retrieval processes. Our question in the present studies was whether the bilingual advantage found in conflict resolution extended to these memory processes. Recent analyses have suggested that memory retrieval involves two major compo- nents  familiarity and recollection  that differ in their reliance on executive control. The usual interpretation is that executive functions contribute to recollection but that *Corresponding author. Email: zw@apple.phils.uj.edu.pl International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism Vol. 13, No. 5, September 2010, 575595 ISSN 1367-0050 print/ISSN 1747-7522 online # 2010 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/13670050.2010.488287 http://www.informaworld.com