Slow naming of pictures facilitates memory for their names

Abstract

Speakers remember their own utterances better than those of their interlocutors, suggesting that language production is beneficial to memory. This may be partly explained by a generation effect: The act of generating a word is known to lead to a memory advantage (Slamecka & Graf, 1978). In earlier work, we showed a generation effect for recognition of images (Zormpa, Brehm, Hoedemaker, & Meyer, 2019). Here, we tested whether the recognition of their names would also benefit from name generation. Testing whether picture naming improves memory for words was our primary aim, as it serves to clarify whether the representations affected by generation are visual or conceptual/lexical. A secondary aim was to assess the influence of processing time on memory. Fifty-one participants named pictures in three conditions: after hearing the picture name (identity condition), backward speech, or an unrelated word. A day later, recognition memory was tested in a yes/no task. Memory in the backward speech and unrelated conditions, which required generation, was superior to memory in the identity condition, which did not require generation. The time taken by participants for naming was a good predictor of memory, such that words that took longer to be retrieved were remembered better. Importantly, that was the case only when generation was required: In the no-generation (identity) condition, processing time was not related to recognition memory performance. This work has shown that generation affects conceptual/lexical representations, making an important contribution to the understanding of the relationship between memory and language.

A Principled Approach to Feature Selection in Models of Sentence Processing

“…This modification of the basic equations of ACT‐R would require thorough testing using data from properly powered experimental designs. Such data do not exist yet, so such a large‐scale evaluation is not currently possible; however, more and more researchers are attending to the power properties of their studies (Brehm & Goldrick, 2017; Stack, James, & Watson, 2018; Zormpa, Meyer, & Brehm, 2019), and we expect that such data will become available in the future.…”

In conversation, answers are remembered better than the questions themselves.

“…This finding is attributable to a combination of two established effects in the memory for language literature. Generating labels for items, rather than reading or hearing them, creates a memory benefit known as the generation effect (Bertsch et al, 2007; Dew & Mulligan, 2008; Slamecka & Graf, 1978; Zormpa, Brehm, et al, 2019; Zormpa, Meyer, et al, 2019), while producing words aloud, rather than saying them silently, creates a memory benefit known as the production effect (MacLeod et al, 2010; Ozubko et al, 2014; Zormpa, Brehm, et al, 2019). In the elicited conversations in Experiment 3, individuals had to generate as well as produce their responses, enhancing memory due to both effects.…”

How to embrace variation and accept uncertainty in linguistic and psycholinguistic data analysis

“…Psychologists (Cohen 1962(Cohen , 1988 have long pointed out the importance of ensuring high statistical power for making discovery claims, but until recently these recommendations have largely been ignored in linguistics, psychology, and psycholinguistics; some recent papers that take power into account are Brehm and Goldrick (2017); Stack et al (2018); Zormpa et al (2019). In response to the replication crisis that (partly) resulted from underpowered studies (Open Science Collaboration 2015), several remedies have been suggested, such as reducing the probability of committing a Type I error to 0.005 (Benjamin et al 2018), or abolishing statistical significance testing entirely (McShane et al 2019).…”