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In contrast to most research on bilingual memory that focuses on how words in either lexicon are mapped onto memory for objects and concepts, we focus on memory for events in the personal past. Using a word-cue technique in sessions devoted exclusively to one language, we found that older His-panic immigrants who had come to the United States as adults internally retrieved autobiographical memories in Spanish for events in the country of origin and in English for events in the U.S.These par-ticipants were consistently capable of discerning whether a memory had come to them "in words " or not, reflecting the distinction between purely imagistic or conceptual memories and specifically lin-guistic memories. Viaexamination of other phenomenological features of these memories (sense of re-living, sensory detail, emotionality, and rehearsal), we conclude that the linguistidnonlinguistic dis-tinction is fundamental and independent of these other characteristics. Bilinguals encode and retrieve certain autobiographical memories in one or the other language according to the context of encoding, and these linguistic characteristics are stable properties of those memories over time. Current models ofbilingual memory typically consider how language elements (phonological, syntactic, seman-tic) are related to conceptual and imagistic memory stores. Revised hierarchy models ofbilingual memory posit two (or more) interconnected lexicons, which have differen-tial access to a conceptual, and presumably nonlinguistic