About 20 years ago I read about an experiment, where they played a game involving a ball with some young kids that had just started to learn to speak. They did a test to evaluate their vocabulary and played the game. Then they came back a year later. Again they evaluated their vocabulary, and asked if they recall the game.

The interesting part was that the kids that had not learned the word ball when they first played, but since learned it, would not use that word when recalling the rules of the game. Based on this experiment, they suggested that there was a close link between the available vocabulary and formation of memory.

I told my dad about this. He had his major in Norwegian (our native language) and had taught Norwegian to immigrants from Pakistan and similar in the 70s, and had a keen interest in languages.

He found it very interesting, as he had read studies showing that immigrants who lost their native language also lost knowledge they learned before they emigrated. Things they had learned at school or university for example.

So both sets of studies seemed to point to the same cause, that the memories formed were closely linked to the language you know at the time of formation.

As such I'm not terribly surprised that the same seems to be happening with visual memories, as this article suggest. Then again, totally not my field.