Bilingualism and cognitive resilience: Online episodic memory for auditory verbal material

Abstract

Cognitive reserve refers to the ability to maintain cognitive functioning despite aging or neuropathology. Episodic memory is thought to better represent the neural basis of cognitive reserve than other cognitive abilities or static proxies such as education. The present study examines whether bilingual language experience is associated with enhanced episodic memory for auditorily presented verbal material, using an online paradigm modeled on established clinical memory measures. Participants complete an episodic memory task via Pavlovia involving auditory encoding of word lists, followed by immediate and delayed recall. This task demands auditory perception, phonological encoding, and memory consolidation, closely paralleling verbal episodic memory measures commonly used in cognitive reserve research. Language experience is assessed using background questionnaires capturing age of acquisition, daily language use, and proficiency tests. The experiment is underway, with a target sample of about 60 adult participants. We predict that bilingual participants will demonstrate higher recall accuracy and reduced forgetting over the delay compared to monolinguals and that greater balance and intensity of bilingual language use will be associated with stronger episodic memory performance. By adopting an episodic memory structure shown to predict cognitive reserve and implementing it with auditory verbal stimuli, this student-led project contributes to acoustically grounded approaches to bilingual cognition using scalable online methods.