LANGUAGE AND CATEGORY CLUSTERING IN BILINGUAL FREE RECALL

Arabic-English bilinguals were given free recall learning trials with a list of words drawn from two taxonomic categories, half the words in each category in English and half in Arabic. Lists which were serially organized into language blocks tended to be less well recalled than lists organized into category blocks. Analysis of clustering suggested that the main principle of subjective organization was in terms of intralingual/intracategory groupings. A second experiment using English-Arabic-French lists also supported this conclusion. The results were interpreted as reflecting greater intralingual/intracategory associative strength than either intralingual/intercategory or interlingual/intracategory associative strengths. © 1969 Academic Press Inc. All rights reserved.