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The relationship between specific language background, stimulus modality, and false memory

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Research Subject Categories::SOCIAL SCIENCES::Social sciences::Psychology
 Memory
 Language
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Hirshorn, Elizabeth, Grossi, Giordana
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Spring 2025
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2025-05
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SUNY New Paltz Undergraduate Honors Thesis Collection
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Wilson_Honors.pdf
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http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12648/16544
Abstract
Memory is extremely fallible. It is easy to create a false memory (i.e., a memory of something you did not experience) using the DRM paradigm. Research shows that the semantic priming is likely the source of the classic false memory effect that leads to misremembering a word like “shirt” after seeing a list of words like “dress, coat, and pants.” Semantic priming is also present cross-linguistically, such that in an English/French bilingual, dog in English primes chien (dog) in French or even related words like chat (cat). A second robust finding is that the DRM effect is larger when stimuli are presented auditorily vs. visually in languages that use alphabetic writing systems (e.g., English). However, it has been reported that the opposite effect was observed in Chinese, which has a very different writing system, such that false memories were recalled more visually than auditorily (Mao et al, 2010). The current study recruited bilingual participants who have the common language of English, but whose second language is either Chinese or a language that uses an alphabetic script (e.g., French or Spanish), to test if these modality effects also transfer cross-linguistically. Results did not support our hypothesis. Interestingly, the predicted modality x language group interaction was present in the memory for old words, where alphabetic bilinguals were more accurate for visually than auditorily presented words, but English-Chinese bilinguals were equally accurate for visually and auditorily presented words. These results suggest that the languages you know may influence how you use your memory.
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