About 20 years ago I read about an experiment, where they played a game involving a ball with some young kids that had just started to learn to speak. They did a test to evaluate their vocabulary and played the game. Then they came back a year later. Again they evaluated their vocabulary, and asked if they recall the game.
The interesting part was that the kids that had not learned the word ball when they first played, but since learned it, would not use that word when recalling the rules of the game. Based on this experiment, they suggested that there was a close link between the available vocabulary and formation of memory.
I told my dad about this. He had his major in Norwegian (our native language) and had taught Norwegian to immigrants from Pakistan and similar in the 70s, and had a keen interest in languages.
He found it very interesting, as he had read studies showing that immigrants who lost their native language also lost knowledge they learned before they emigrated. Things they had learned at school or university for example.
So both sets of studies seemed to point to the same cause, that the memories formed were closely linked to the language you know at the time of formation.
As such I'm not terribly surprised that the same seems to be happening with visual memories, as this article suggest. Then again, totally not my field.
As an ESL who grew up in Slovenia, did most of his work in English, and now lives in USA with full immersion[1] – the memory language barrier is very noticeable.
Talking to my mom and sister about things that happened in Slovenia is easy and fluent. Talking about things that happened in USA is … hard. I have to translate, I can’t find words, the concepts make no sense, everything is awkward.
Make me talk about software engineering in Slovenian and I sound like a bumbling fool. It just doesn’t work. Every 3rd word is English. Entire sentences sometimes.
[1] I speak Slovenian maybe a couple times per month nowadays
This is likely because language uptake is most successful when "unrooted" to a pre-existing language framework. You're utilizing distinct memory/knowledge graphs.
You sound like a bumbling fool because you're having to forge novel connections between the two recall graphs.
It's why I look on awe on people like my high school Spanish teacher who fluently spoke 11 languages. When she got upset, you never knew which was going to come out!
I think that's fairly normal. When you learn a concept in a language it's difficult to convey it in a foreign language if you don't have the vocabulary, even if you're a native speaker. That happens to me all the time.
> He found it very interesting, as he had read studies showing that immigrants who lost their native language also lost knowledge they learned before they emigrated.
That example would be a negative aspect of it, but forgetting things in itself can be positive. For example, I wonder if this might also work for trauma and rebuilding a new life after migrating to a different country.
“People think that epilepsy is divine simply because they don’t have any idea what causes epilepsy. But I believe that someday we will understand what causes epilepsy, and at that moment, we will cease to believe that it’s divine. And so it is with everything in the universe” — Hippocrates
The interesting part was that the kids that had not learned the word ball when they first played, but since learned it, would not use that word when recalling the rules of the game. Based on this experiment, they suggested that there was a close link between the available vocabulary and formation of memory.
I told my dad about this. He had his major in Norwegian (our native language) and had taught Norwegian to immigrants from Pakistan and similar in the 70s, and had a keen interest in languages.
He found it very interesting, as he had read studies showing that immigrants who lost their native language also lost knowledge they learned before they emigrated. Things they had learned at school or university for example.
So both sets of studies seemed to point to the same cause, that the memories formed were closely linked to the language you know at the time of formation.
As such I'm not terribly surprised that the same seems to be happening with visual memories, as this article suggest. Then again, totally not my field.