The Role of L2 and Cultural Awareness in Memory Recall: A Cross-Cultural Study
Trent Chen Chun-yin and Doris Chen
Abstract
Past literature on memory research has primarily focused on emotions and parent-child memory sharing, but has yet to account for cross-cultural effects on L2 learners’ performance on memory recall. Therefore, the present study identifies the role of an L2 in terms of cultural awareness and memory recall. 48 participants were recruited and grouped into the Sino-sphere group and the non-Sino-sphere group, each with 16 participants. 16 L1 Mandarin speakers from Taiwan served as the control group. Participants were asked to complete a two-phase experiment involving a survey and memory recall task. The survey investigated the participants’ knowledge of Han culture based on 36 Oriental and Occidental test items, and the recall task was employed to elicit the participants’ memories based on 12 Oriental and Occidental cue words.
The results indicate the following: regarding recall age, an unspecified setting of a reference period resulted in a generalized recall performance. The participants drew memories from their recent three to five years up to the time of the recall task. Cultural awareness might not directly link to self-experienced memory production, regardless of the cultural proximity of cue words. Participants favor Adjunct over Argument tokens across groups in their memory recall and to generate how- and what-tokens. The Sino-sphere, adopting a more conservative approach, differed to the Non-Sino-sphere group, providing extensive details during memory recollection.
Keywords: Memory recall, cultural awareness, Chinese, cross-cultural study, cognitive processing, linguistic anthropology