Cross-language postevent misinformation effects in Spanish–English bilingual witnesses.

Three experiments examined whether postevent misinformation affects eyewitness memory across languages in bilingual witnesses. Participants watched a videotaped simulation of a robbery, read a postevent narrative that contained misleading information about the robbery, and answered either forced-choice or cued-recall questions about 6 target items from the videotape. Experiment I was conducted entirely in English, but Experiments 2 and 3 tested Spanish–English bilingual participants who were exposed to 1 of 3 language combinations of the postevent narrative and memory test—Spanish–Spanish, English–Spanish, or Spanish–English (as well as English–English in Experiment 3). Across all 3 experiments, the effects of postevent misinformation were as large in the cross-language conditions as in the same-language conditions. This study has important implications for the justice system, and the results suggest new ways to study postevent misinformation effects and bilingual memory. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)