ABSTRACT
Retention of “nonattended” unilingual and bilingual lists consisting of visually presented unrelated words was studied in several experiments in which the primary task involved high or low information load. The primary task was verbal in character and was performed in one of the bilingual subjects’ languages. The main finding was that in the high-load condition, retention of the nonattended lists was superior for words from that language which was used in the primary task. No such difference was found in the low-load condition. It is argued that when one of the bilingual’s language systems is activated under conditions involving high mental load, the other language system becomes less operative, probably due to a more difficult interlingual switching process.
