Bilinguals' logical inference-making and language tagging

Inference-making is a critical process in understanding and processing information daily. People synthesize inputs into a whole and retain the whole (gist) instead of specific parts (verbatim). False recognition of inferred information offers evidence for it. We conducted two studies to examine whether memory errors occur similarly when bilinguals are tested concurrently on two languages, and whether bilinguals remember the language in which the information is received (language tag). In two experiments, we tested Turkish-English bilingual students with Turkish, English, and dual-language sentence groups, which induced spatial inferences about objects. In Experiment 1, we found inferences were falsely recognized in Turkish and English conditions, but not in dual-language. We found no effect of individual cognitive differences. In Experiment 2, we found that false recognition of inferred sentences was predicted more by lower EF and higher L2. In both experiments, tag identification was overall accurate and partially predicted by higher cognitive functions. We conclude that inferring in L2 induces memory errors, and inferences are tagged with the language of encoding.