P-Group: Anne Pycha

P-Group presentation: Anne Pycha

False memories for words with free variation in English and Spanish

This research examines whether free variation makes listeners more (or less) likely to falsely remember words. Free variation is typically restricted to certain phonemes, and to certain positions. In English, for example, /t/ can be realized as glottal stop, but only in final position. Similarly, in many dialects of Spanish, /s/ can be realized as aspiration, but only before another consonant. These differences suggest that listeners may encode and retrieve memories for variable words differently than those for non-variable words, an idea that we tested with false memory experiments in English and Spanish. At study, we presented listeners with lists of spoken phonological neighbors. For English, lists included words such as lip, tin, type, etc. (neighbors of tip) and rat, ban, bet, etc. (neighbors of bat). For Spanish, lists included words such as ropa, sepa, soda (neighbors of sopa ‘soap’), gusto, vasto, bulto, etc. (neighbors of busto ‘chest’), and demos, ramos, renos, etc. (neighbors of remos ‘oars’). At test, participants completed two memory tasks, free recall and yes/no recognition. For both tasks, results show that participants often “remembered” the unheard English words tip and bat, and the unheard Spanish words sopa, busto, and remos, replicating previous work indicating that repeated partial activation from phonological neighbors can give rise to false memories. However, results diverged for variable words in English, where false memory rates were significantly lower for words like bat compared to tip, compared to Spanish, where false memory rates were equivalent for words like sopa, busto, and remos. We will discuss the implications for the lexical representations of variable words.