I bet I’ll remember “biochemistry” – Meta-memory as a function of lexical features and language background

• Author(s) / Creator(s)

  • Grace C. Lin
  • Rachel N. Smith
  • Chelsea Parlett-Pelleriti
  • Masha R. Jones
  • Susanne M. Jaeggi

• Previous research has shown that people are more likely to remember positive and negative words compared to neutral words. The present study investigates whether participants with varying language backgrounds would differentially remember words based on the words’ lexical feature of valence. In a meta-memory task, participants placed a bet on each word in a series based on how likely they think they would recall the word. After the words were presented, participants freely recalled as many words as they could. Findings from over 140 English monolingual, English dominant bilingual, or English non-dominant bilingual college students show that participants chose to bet higher on negative and positive as compared to neutral words, but remembered more negative than positive or neutral words. However, English non-dominant bilinguals bet more points on positive words than their peers did, but they were similarly accurate in their overall recall, indicating that cultural/language background might differentially affect individuals’ sensitivity to word valence.

• Date created

  2019-03-26

• Subjects / Keywords

  • language dominance
  • valence
  • metamemory
  • metacognition
  • bilingualism

• Type of Item

  Article (Published)

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/r3-95m7-9p48

• License

  Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International