Access to inner language enhances memory for events

Abstract

Events are temporally-bounded experiences involving people, objects and actions that can be segmented into sequences of smaller meaningful events (e.g., the steps involved in constructing a piece of furniture). We investigated whether inner language enhances memory for events in a naturalistic, non-verbal task where participants constructed simple models from memory. Across three experiments, we used linguistic suppression in a dual-task paradigm to test whether inner language improved overall memory performance and completion time, additionally exploring the number of events that could be recalled. We found that access to inner language at encoding consistently affected memory performance: when inner language was disrupted at encoding, participants were poorer at recalling the models and remembered fewer events. This effect was present whether or not the number of events to be recalled exceed event memory capacity (estimated to be approximately 7-8 events). Critically, the effect of linguistic suppression on memory performance was greater than a control secondary task that did not affect access to language; that is, poorer performance was not solely due to dual-task effects. The results support the proposal that inner language enhances event memory via a mechanism of linguistic bootstrapping, which in turn extends theories of event memory and adds to a growing body of evidence that inner language is a highly valuable cognitive tool.