Alumna’s Research Finds Benefits to Bilingual Listening

Ren Salig, NACS Ph.D. ’24, Published Studies Showing Attention and Memory Benefits for Bilingual Adults Listening to Information Presented in Two Languages

According to new research led by Ren Salig, Ph.D. ’24, an alumna of the Program in Neuroscience and Cognitive Science (NACS), people who speak two languages can recall information better when it is presented using a mix of two languages—such as a sentence starting in English and ending in Spanish—rather than one language throughout.

Published in Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, the findings are contrary to popular beliefs about how bilingual people best take in information.

“Not all, but a lot of bilinguals switch between their languages in their daily life, when they are talking to family or friends who share their languages. Often, society labels that as a nuisance behavior, or something that is bad or confusing or detrimental, and so it is discouraged,” said Salig, who is an incoming assistant professor at The College of New Jersey. “So one of the novel parts of this study was focusing on how this thing that people do all the time in their everyday interactions could actually be beneficial.”

Another novel part of the study was the way in which the experiment was designed. One hundred seventy-seven Spanish and English speaking adults listened to a series of short stories and conversations—some only in English, some only in Spanish, and some containing both Spanish and English and thus what’s called “code switches,” when the language changes. Then, they recorded themselves retelling what they listened to in 75 seconds, to show the researchers how many details from what they heard they were able to recall.

“There’s a lot of work on these types of switches and how bilinguals process them, but a lot of that work uses methods that are not very much like the real world; people might be asked to look at a picture of an animal, and then be told what language they need to name it in, or they might be asked to read a sentence word for word, and that’s not a very natural way to engage with language,” Salig explained. “So, one of the unique things with this study is that we were actually situating switches between languages in story and conversational contexts, which is a lot more like how someone would encounter a switch in the real world.”

Among other findings, the researchers found that the bilingual study participants recalled details better when they heard them in a code-switched sentence.

This finding adds to those outlined in a paper that Salig published in The Journal of Memory and Language in August 2025. In that study, 92 bilingual adults were asked to listen to short stories that contained code switches. The stories were periodically paused, participants were asked to assess their attention level, and then they were asked multiple choice questions about what they were hearing. From that exercise, the researchers found that bilinguals pay greater attention to, and better remember information that is presented in, code-switched sentences.

To rule out that the bilingual adults weren’t just paying greater attention to the code-switched information because of the distinctly different sounds they were suddenly hearing from the new language, 110 English-speaking monolinguals performed the same tasks, but did not report their attention increasing after the languages switched.

“When the people who only speak English heard a switch from English into Spanish, instead of tuning in and paying more attention, they actually tuned out and seemed to sort of think ‘OK this content is not for me,’” Salig said. “That told us that it seems to be something different than just the sound being different or exciting that grabs someone’s attention and helps them remember information better. It seems to be that the bilinguals have learned that when there’s a code switch, that’s something that they should tune into.”

Though neither of the studies centered on students in a classroom, Salig and her coauthors—which include her mentors, Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences Professor Jared Novick and Department of Psychology Associate Professor Robert Slevc—believe that their findings open the door to discussions and future studies concerning contemporary classroom approaches.

“Working with Ren on these studies was a rare pleasure. She has an exceptional ability to take theoretically complex questions about bilingual language processing and distill them into elegant, well-controlled experiments, with clear real-world implications,” Novick said. “Ren really does have an unusual combination of theoretical sophistication and commitment to public impact. Her studies definitely advance our understanding of bilingual language processing, sure, but also speak directly to educational contexts where code-switching is common yet poorly understood.”

Read Salig’s latest research paper “Bilinguals have better recall for code-switched information”

Published on Tue, Feb 17, 2026 - 11:25AM