Age of second language (L2) acquisition (AoA) has been shown to influence various memory processes in bilinguals (Yoo and Kaushanskaya, 2016; Volkovyskaya et al., 2017; Macmillan et al., 2021). However, most studies have employed random or arbitrary sequences of disconnected stimuli, failing to assess whether AoA impacts a critical aspect of daily communication: the ability to recall information from unfolding discourse. To bridge this gap, we compared the performance of early and late bilinguals (EBs and LBs) on two naturalistic recall tasks with low and high processing demands.

Age of second language (L2) acquisition is the age of first intensive exposure to L2 (Birdsong, 2006; Saito, 2015a). Depending on whether this occurred before or after middle childhood, with cut-offs ranging from 5 to 8years old (Tao et al., 2011; Cardimona et al., 2016; Nair et al., 2016; Bonfieni et al., 2019; Claussenius-Kalman et al., 2020; Sulpizio et al., 2020), persons are respectively classified into EBs and LBs. During non-naturalistic tasks, EBs outperform or differ from LBs in phonological (Archila-Suerte et al., 2012), lexico-semantic (Sabourin et al., 2014; Saito, 2015a,b), and morphosyntactic (Veríssimo et al., 2018) tasks, as well as in executive control (Bonfieni et al., 2019) measures. Given the ubiquitous role of these domains in discourse processing, AoA may also modulate text-level information recall.

Information recall involves evoking recent or distant events and construing them through language (Rubin and Umanath, 2015), as done when we (re)tell a story, a piece of news, or an anecdote. Though typically studied based on lists of disconnected stimulus lists (Raman et al., 2018; Kilecioğlu et al., 2020; Macmillan et al., 2021), this domain can be fruitfully tapped through two naturalistic tasks: single-language recall (SLR) and consecutive interpreting (CI). In SLR tasks, participants are presented with pieces of discourse and asked to recount their contents as exhaustively as possible, in the same language (Hiltunen and Vik, 2017; Prichard and Christman, 2017; Newberry and Bailey, 2019). For its part, CI requires listening to sequences of continuous speech in one language so as to render them into another language after a time period (Hamidi and Pöchhacker, 2007; Choi, 2013; Liu, 2013; Wu, 2013). Both tasks allow for the use of notes to aid information retrieval but they differ in their overarching cognitive demands, with CI proving more stringent than SLR due to the added challenges of cross-linguistic processing (Hiltunen et al., 2016).

Although these two tasks have informed several topics in the bilingualism agenda (Hiltunen and Vik, 2017; Dong et al., 2018; García, 2019; Newberry and Bailey, 2019), no study has examined how AoA impacts on them. Yet, evidence from non-naturalistic studies shows that EBs outperform LBs in cued word (Yoo and Kaushanskaya, 2016; Macmillan et al., 2021) and picture (Volkovyskaya et al., 2017) recall tasks, suggesting that the same may occur in the face of unfolding texts. Moreover, recall of discourse-level information can be influenced by expertise in specific bilingual skills (Hiltunen and Vik, 2017), indicating that this domain can indeed be shaped by subject-level variables in this population.

Importantly, to effectively capture the impact of AoA on information recall, key potential confounds need to be addressed. First, given that AoA may correlate with other bilingual-experience-related variables that impact information recall (e.g., L2 proficiency, time of exposure; Oh et al., 2019; López, 2021), relevant factors should be accounted for in the group-formation stage, ideally through exhaustive, validated instruments. Moreover, AoA is known to modulate speech rate, a factor that could impinge on information delivery upon testing (Guion et al., 2000; Saito, 2015a). Also, AoA can affect attentional skills (Kapa and Colombo, 2013), which may critically influence text-level processing by favoring concentration on and appraisal of both key and secondary information (Meppelink and Bol, 2015; Sauer and Hope, 2016). Therefore, robust testing of our hypothesis should directly tackle these issues.

Against this background, we examined whether information recall is affected by AoA in text-level tasks with low (SLR) and high (CI) cognitive demands. Our analyses focused on a validated completeness measure (exhaustiveness and precision in information recall). To account for key potential confounds, we ensured that both groups were systematically matched across multiple bilingual-experience variables using a validated tool (Schaeffer et al., 2020), while empirically addressing the role of speech rate and attentional speed as potential modulators of participants’ outcomes. Based on previous findings, we hypothesized that, across both tasks, information would be better recalled by EBs than LBs. With this approach, we aim to shed new light on how AoA influences bilinguals’ abilities to recall verbal information from naturalistic discourse beyond isolated stimuli.

This study explored the impact of AoA on two naturalistic information recall tasks: SLR and CI. In both cases, information completeness was higher for EBs than LBs, irrespective of attentional speed. No significant differences emerged between groups in any of the control measures. These findings are discussed below.

In SLR, EBs recalled more information than LBs. This aligns with previous studies showing that AoA is associated with information encoding and retrieval in cued word (Yoo and Kaushanskaya, 2016; Macmillan et al., 2021) and picture (Volkovyskaya et al., 2017) recall tasks. Crucially, our study extends these findings, suggesting that AoA can also modulate information recall in the face of ecological textual materials. Tentatively, this effect could be influenced by EBs’ greater availability of cognitive resources to meet task-related comprehension and memory demands (Akhtar and Menjivar, 2012). Indeed, lower AoA has been linked to reduced effort for concomitant linguistic (e.g., morphosyntactic; Ullman, 2001) and executive (Akhtar and Menjivar, 2012) processes. This, we propose, might free cognitive resources to meet information retrieval requisites during SLR.

The advantage of EBs was also significant in CI. This task is more demanding than SLR, as information must be first processed in L2, retained for a brief period, and then retrieved and encoded into L1 (Napier, 2015; Liang et al., 2019). Whereas some AoA effects tend to attenuate or disappear as task complexity increases (Marful et al., 2016; Catling and Elsherif, 2020), this result suggests that low AoA boosts information recall even under stringent processing conditions. Of note, better performance for EBs than LBs has been reported in other studies involving tasks with different complexity, such as forward digit recall, passage completion test, and non-word repetition (Delcenserie and Genesee, 2017). In this sense, our study is the first to show that such demand-independent advantages for EBs also manifest for information recall in natural discourse.

Moreover, as shown in Table 1, both groups were systematically matched across numerous variables that could impact on information recall skills, such as language competence (Schweppe et al., 2015) and working memory (Loaiza et al., 2011; Ljung et al., 2013). In particular, such matching was achieved through a recent tool shown to possess high validity to discriminate bilingual individuals based on multiple aspects of their linguistic profile (Schaeffer et al., 2020). In this sense, AoA seems to modulate text-level information recall not only irrespective of task demands, but also regardless of relevant executive and linguistic variables as well as the participants’ broad bilingual and cognitive profiles. This would suggest that AoA has a direct impact on information recall outcomes. Potentially, this might be due to a sum effect of its experiential implications, such as more years of L2 exposure in time windows sensitive to incidental development of linguistic skills (Paradis, 2009). In this sense, our findings pave the way for a new agenda to elucidate the determinants of the observed effect.

Interestingly, EBs also presented enhanced attentional skills. However, ANCOVA results showed that their advantages over LBs in both tasks were uninfluenced by such a factor. Although, attentional capacity may impact information recall in single-item tasks (Sauer and Hope, 2016; Unsworth and Miller, 2021), our findings indicate that, in the face of discourse-level material, the overall effect of AoA on recall may supersede that of attentional skills proper. Indeed, such a finding is in line with evidence that linguistic processing differences between specific bilingual groups are not driven by cognitive control differences (García, 2014; Santilli et al., 2019). This was corroborated by mediation analyses, showing that attentional skills did not mediate the effect of AoA on information recall in either task. Indeed, previous research shows that linguistic processing advantages related to individual bilingual experiences may emerge irrespective of executive outcomes (Archila-Suerte et al., 2015; Santilli et al., 2019). In addition, better information recall for EBs was observed in the absence of speech rate differences, further suggesting that their higher scores were not driven by linguistic productivity.

Further attesting to differences between both groups, SLR and CI outcomes were significantly (and positively) correlated in EBs, but not in LBs. This suggests that individual information recall skills in the former group operate in a task-independent manner, whereas such abilities seem to be differently deployed depending on task difficulty in LBs. Future studies could illuminate this issue with protocols designed specifically to capture cross-task variability in each population.

Of note, participants’ performance was rather low in both conditions, with EBs approaching 30% accuracy. Though somewhat unexpected, this is in keeping with the heterogeneous outcomes reported in the literature, ranging from <45% (Vander Beken and Brysbaert, 2018) to >65% (Hiltunen and Vik, 2017). For example, using L1 and L2 SLR tasks, Vander Beken and Brysbaert (2018) reported scores of 44.1 and 56.3%, respectively. Our samples’ lower performance level probably reflects our protocol’s demands. Whereas Vander Beken and Brysbaert (2018) used written texts and asked participants to summarize them in detail for writing-based recall, the present study involved longer auditory texts with on-the-fly note-taking and ulterior oral recall. Given that oral L2 tasks tend to reduce performance relative to their written counterparts (Kim, 2015; Vandergrift and Baker, 2015).

Finally, our findings carry theoretical implications. First, whereas multiple studies have revealed AoA effects in highly constrained tasks, ours shows that earlier L2 acquisition can impact text-level processing. In this sense, our study meets recent calls for more ecological approaches to the study of language, in general, and bilingualism, in particular (Trevisan et al., 2017; Adams et al., 2018; García et al., 2018; Trevisan and García, 2019; Birba et al., 2020a,b), leading to more situated accounts of the phenomenon. Second, our results reinforce the view that discourse-level recalling is influenced by specific bilingual experiences. Hiltunen and Vik (2017) found that prose recall was better in bilinguals with sustained experience in simultaneous interpreting relative to non-interpreter bilinguals. The present study indicates that AoA may be yet another subject-level variable shaping this domain among the heterogeneous bilingual population. Third, our results show that the impact of AoA per se seems strong enough so as to become uninfluenced by other variables known to impact task performance, such as speech rate and attentional skills. This corroborates the view that AoA may represent one of the most important variables accounting for cognitive variability across bilingual individuals (Birdsong, 2018; DeLuca et al., 2020). Briefly, these considerations can inform and extend current accounts of how different bilingual profiles impact cognitive skills.

Our study is not without limitations. First, our sample size was moderate. Although it was supported by power estimation results and it proved similar to or larger than those of other relevant studies in the field (Sabourin et al., 2014; Giezen et al., 2015; Yoo and Kaushanskaya, 2016), future research should replicate our experiment with more participants. Second, the current study used only two tasks, with brief texts allowing for no interaction. New studies should assess whether AoA impacts recall in longer and interactive pieces of discourse. Third, given our interest on AoA, the present design was focused how bilinguals recall information from L2 texts in both intra- and inter-linguistic conditions. Looking forward, it would be interesting to explore whether and how information recall is affected by AoA during L1 SLR and L1-to-L2 CI. This would provide insights on potential asymmetrical effects known to modulate other aspects of bilingual processing (Xia and Andrews, 2015; Declerck and Grainger, 2017; Olson, 2017). Fourth, our samples contained a majority of female participants. While this captures the gender distribution of the profession in China (where recruitment was conducted; Han, 2016) and beyond (Hickey, 2019), while favoring comparability with earlier research (Injoque-Ricle et al., 2015; Dong and Zhong, 2017; Hiltunen and Vik, 2017; Ünlü and Şimşek, 2018; Santilli et al., 2019), future works should strive to find more balanced samples. Also, our median-split strategy for group formation yielded a cut-off of 7 to separate EBs and LBs. While other thresholds, such as AoA 6 or 7, may prove relevant, these are impracticable in our sample as they give rise to highly unbalanced groups. New studies should explore whether present results are reproduced using other AoA cut-offs. Fifth, participants’ notes were discarded as their analysis was not contemplated in our design. While these data were orthogonal to our hypotheses, future works should systematically collect and analyze these materials as potential mediators of information recall outcomes. Sixth, the use of real-life materials maximized ecological validity but it prevented us from introducing “task” as a within-subject predictor, given that the texts used for SLR and CI differed in many respects. Future works could replicate our study employing validated protocols to create naturalistic texts, which are matched for multiple variables (Trevisan et al., 2017; García et al., 2018; Trevisan and García, 2019; Birba et al., 2020a,b; Moguilner et al., 2021). Seventh, data on AoA were gleaned through self-report assessments. Despite their limitations (e.g., social desirability biases), subjective estimations of bilingual profiles are standard in the field (Ardal et al., 1990; Weber-Fox and Neville, 1996, 2001; Mahendra and Arkin, 2003; Moreno and Kutas, 2005; Hernandez et al., 2007; Pakulak and Neville, 2011; Waldron and Hernandez, 2013; Berken et al., 2015; Nichols and Joanisse, 2016; Santilli et al., 2019; Vilas et al., 2019), and their outcomes can predict language ability (Marian et al., 2007), reproduce reaction-time results (Langdon et al., 2005), and replicate naming test scores (Gollan et al., 2012). Yet, future works should strive to test our hypotheses with objective AoA measures. Finally, low scores were observed across tasks. In addition to task-specific factors (e.g., text length and difficulty, note-talking modality), this might reflect the stringent criteria of our performance judgment protocol. While these criteria have been reported in previous works (Mills et al., 1993; Roediger and Karpicke, 2006; Vander Beken and Brysbaert, 2018; Vander Beken et al., 2020), maximizing comparability between our findings and relevant antecedents, future studies should consider different exigency thresholds.

Our study suggests that a lower AoA entails better abilities to recall information from naturalistic texts, irrespective of task demands and attentional skills. Such results bridge the gap between classical memory paradigms and ecological designs in bilingualism research. Further work along these lines could afford novel insights on how particular language profiles shape information processing in daily communicative settings.

All experimental data are fully available online at: https://osf.io/xbszv/.

Ethical review and approval was not required for the study on human participants in accordance with the local legislation and institutional requirements. The patients/participants provided their written informed consent to participate in this study.

IC: concept and design, data collection, data analysis, and manuscript draft preparation. JH: concept and design and manuscript revision. EM: manuscript revision. AG: analysis of strategy, manuscript draft preparation, and critical revision. All authors contributed to the article and approved the submitted version.

This work was supported by Humanities and Social Science Fund of Chinese Ministry of Education (grant number: 17YJC740023), Foreign Expert Program in China (grant numbers: G20190023033 and G20200023036), CONICET, ANID, and FONDECYT Regular (grant number: 1210176), and Programa Interdisciplinario de Investigación Experimental en Comunicación y Cognición (PIIECC), Facultad de Humanidades, USACH.

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.