BILINGUAL MEMORY: THE WEAK HYPOTHESIS
Aleta Gulden, Jos E. Mart nez, Juan Clemente Zamora · 2016
In his now classic book on language contact, Uriel Weinreich (1953) discussed the nature of the linguistic sign for the bilingual individual. The sign, in Hjelmslevian terms (Weinreich says Saussurean), combines a unit of expression and one of content. The question, then, is whether the bilingual individual has for each sign one content (meaning) in each language, with corresponding expressions (phonemic realizations), or whether the individual has only one content with two expressions. The former Weinreich calls coordination, the latter com pounding. Another situation, subordination, need not concern us, because it does not really represent bilingualism. Weinreich was discussing the nature of the linguistic sign, but his discussion posed ques tions about how the bilingual individual dealt with information received through language. If content could be kept separate by language (coordinate signs), then it could be hypothe sized that bilinguals stored information in different memory banks for each language. A decade later, P. A. Kolers (1963) did precisely this; he developed Weinreich's ideas into a discussion about bilingual memory. Kolers concluded that bilingual individuals either stored information in a single memory from which both languages could draw when needed (interdependent memory), or they assigned information to separate memories, determined by the language in which the information was received (independent memory). Kolers devel oped tests to determine whether bilinguals had interdependent or independent memories. His conclusion favored the latter hypothesis (Kolers, 1963 and 1964). We shall call the strong hypothesis an approach to the problem that begins by claiming that bilinguals store information received through language in either one or several mem ories. A less strong claim, or weak hypothesis, would be that bilingual individuals either store information with no reference to language or that they include language tagging as part of the information stored. In the latter case, it may be that there is only one bank where infor mation is stored pretagged by language, or that there are two banks or memories, one for each language. We believe, however, that this further refinement cannot be proved by testing methods available today. Certainly it cannot be proved by recall or recognition tests; neuro logical testing of a kind not yet available would be required. By language tagging?if it exists?we mean that the language of input of items is part of the information stored with the items if the individuals are bilingual. Kolers (1963) be lieved that if this happened, language specific units would be stored in different, independent memories. As stated, we see no reason for independent memory to be a necessary or even probable sequitur of language tagging. In any case, in testing for the weak hypothesis (as we did) the issue of memory independence-interdependence becomes irrelevant. Since Kolers raised the independence-interdependence issue, many studies have been