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ABSTRACT
A course I took from Wallace Lambert in 1954 at McGill required a novel experiment. Lambert encouraged me to investigate language learning implications of a French-English difference in grammatical habits whereby, in English, descriptive adjectives typically precede the nouns they modify whereas the reverse order is typical in French. A language habits hypothesis thus suggests that unfamiliar phrases would be easiest to remember in their language-typical grammatical order. A mnemonic technique with which I was familiar uses concrete nouns as memory pegs (reminders) for associated information, suggesting that, by analogy, the noun-adjective order would be favored in language memory regardless of language habits. An experiment I devised clearly supported the prediction from the memory-peg hypothesis. Later, tests of that hypothesis and other variants led to the development of a general dual coding theory (DCT) of cognition that entails the cooperative interplay of verbal and nonverbal mental processes in memory, language, and thought. In the extended program, Lambert and I collaborated on experiments involving bilingual memory and cognition that supported DCT and its extension to bilingualism.
BACKGROUND
My research connection to Wallace Lambert began early in my attempts to develop a general scientific theory of mind aimed at explaining such intellectual abilities as memory, problem solving, language, and thinking. The connection began in 1954 when Lambert joined the Psychology faculty at McGiIl University. I then had a McGiIl undergraduate degree and wanted to get into their psychology graduate program. To qualify I had to take make-up undergraduate courses, one of which was an honour's level course on human experimental psychology taught by Lambert. Part of the course required each student to devise and conduct an independent experiment under his supervision.
Among other possibilities, Lambert and I considered untested implications of a grammatical word-order difference between English and French. In English, descriptive adjectives generally precede nouns (e.g., the red, white, and blue flag) whereas in French such adjectives typically follow nouns (e.g., le drapeau bleu, blanc, rouge). The research question was whether English and French speakers would differ in how easily they could learn and remember novel phrases presented in an adjective-noun (A-N) or a noun-adjective (N-A) grammatical order. Lambert reasoned from a language habits perspective that Anglophones should do better with phrases presented...