Knowledge extension through memory integration in Chinese-English bilingual environment: the role of executive functioning

The cornerstone of personal development lies in building a strong knowledge foundation through acquiring information. This study aims to investigate the memory integration performance of Chinese adults under monolingual and bilingual conditions, including Chinese and English. Prior to the experiment, 356 college students were evaluated for executive function to identify participants with high and low levels of executive function. Experiment 1 examined the memory integration performance of college students under different encoding language conditions, while Experiment 2 evaluated their performance under different retrieval language conditions. Experiment 3 aims to address the limitations of the first two studies and further explore the impact of different questioning languages under bilingual encoding conditions. The results indicate that the presentation language of stem facts during the encoding stage has a significant impact on memory integration. Specifically, excellent performance was observed when the first word was presented in the dominant language. In addition, the questioning language used for integrating facts affects memory integration, and as the difficulty of switching between questioning language and encoding language increases, performance decreases. Among them, Chinese questions have the best effect. It is worth noting that this study demonstrates the interaction between executive function and encoding language conditions, rather than retrieval language conditions, indicating that the effects of executive function and language conditions on memory integration vary depending on the processing stage.