Speakers of different languages remember visual scenes differently

Language can have a powerful effect on how people experience events. Here, we examine how the languages people speak guide attention and influence what they remember from a visual scene. When hearing a word, listeners activate other similar-sounding words before settling on the correct target. We tested whether this linguistic co-activation during a visual search task changes memory for objects. Bilinguals and monolinguals remembered English competitor words that overlapped phonologically with a spoken English target better than control objects without name overlap. High Spanish proficiency also enhanced memory for Spanish competitors that overlapped across languages. We conclude that linguistic diversity partly accounts for differences in higher cognitive functions like memory, with multilinguals providing a fertile ground for studying the interaction between language and cognition., , Data was analyzed using R and requires the following R packages:

tidyverse
broom
lme4
afex
emmeans
sjPlot
Hmisc
rstatix
plotrix
ggeffects
ggpattern
data.table

语言可对人们的事件体验产生显著影响。本研究旨在探讨人们所使用的语言如何引导注意力，并影响其对视觉场景中事物的记忆。当听者接收到某个词汇时，在确定正确目标词之前，大脑会先激活其他发音相似的词汇。我们通过视觉搜索任务中的语言共激活现象，检验其是否会改变个体对物体的记忆。

实验结果表明，双语者与单语者对与英语口语目标词存在语音重叠的英语竞争词汇的记忆效果，优于对无名称语音重叠的对照物体。此外，较高的西班牙语熟练度也能提升被试对跨语言语音重叠的西班牙语竞争词汇的记忆表现。综上，语言多样性在一定程度上解释了记忆等高级认知功能的个体差异，而多语言使用者为研究语言与认知的交互机制提供了理想的研究样本。

本研究的数据通过R语言进行分析，所需的R扩展包如下：
tidyverse、broom、lme4、afex、emmeans、sjPlot、Hmisc、rstatix、plotrix、ggeffects、ggpattern、data.table