Abstract: Human memory is organized in many forms and different information may have different storage in mind. It is a long debated issue whether a bilingual's semantic information from the input of different languages shares a common storage. Two contradicted points have been proposed: one holds that semantic information is language-specific and the information from different language is represented in the different part of the memory; the other believes that semantic information is language-general and information from all languages is reserved in a common space of memory. An experiment was conducted to approach the debating issue. In the experiment, a story was presented visually to subjects in either English or Chinese, after reading the story, the subjects were asked to make semantic judgment of target sentences according to the meaning of the story. The experimental results showed that the presenting language of articles had no significant effect on the semantic judgment of target sentences while the presenting language of target sentences made difference, and subjects made much quicker judgment to sentences presented in Chinese than those in English. These results suggest that the semantic information of story presented in any language share the common storage.

Key words: bilingual, semantic information, representation, memory