If you have ever studied a new language and suddenly found yourself blanking on a word in another language you already knew, you are not imagining things. New research from the Netherlands suggests that picking up vocabulary in one language can temporarily interfere with your ability to recall words in another.
This effect is called retroactive inhibition, a memory phenomenon where new learning disrupts access to previously stored information. Because the brain has limited processing resources, fresh material can compete with older knowledge, making it harder to retrieve. In the case of multilingual speakers, this can mean accidentally recalling a word in the wrong language or not remembering it at all.
The study, published in the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, was led by researcher Anne Mickan. Her team wanted to see whether learning new foreign vocabulary could affect access to well-established words from another language.
In the first experiment, 31 native Dutch speakers, all fluent in English but with no Spanish background, were tested on a set of English words. Then, they learned Spanish translations for half of those words. When tested again, they were just as accurate on their English recall, but they were faster when the English words did not have newly learned Spanish counterparts.
A second experiment, involving 86 participants, added an extra step. The initial English test was given a day before the Spanish session. After learning the Spanish words, half the group took the second English test the same day, while the other half waited until the next day. This allowed the researchers to see how overnight consolidation influenced the results.
This time, interference showed up in both accuracy and speed. Participants recalled English words more easily when they had not learned the Spanish versions. The group that waited a day showed even clearer differences, suggesting that consolidation can strengthen the competitive effect between languages.
The findings give scientific backing to the common experience of multilinguals who notice their languages “bumping into” each other when a new one enters the mix. The good news is that these effects are most pronounced in the early stages of learning and may fade with continued practice and use.
Tags: brain, language, learning, vocabularyCategorised in: Uncategorized
This post was written by Christine Rizk