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What makes words more memorable?
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KRIS: Hey Greta, teach me something.
GRETA TUCKUTE: Hey. What makes certain words more memorable than others? We found that words that only have one particular meaning, for instance a word like pineapple, which pretty much only means pineapple and there are no synonyms, that is a memorable word. You are very likely to remember it. And that is in contrast to words like light. Light can mean the opposite of heavy, cigarette lighter, a light in a house. And those words will not be very memorable.
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What makes words more memorable?
Greta Tuckute, PhD Candidate, Cognitive Neuroscience, MIT Dept. of Brain and Cognitive Sciences
Want to learn more? Check out this article:
- “Intrinsically memorable words have unique associations with their meanings”, Tuckute et al 2023, PsyArXiv Preprints
- Abstract: What makes a word memorable? An important claim from past work is that words are encoded by their meanings, and not their forms. If true, then, following rational analysis, memorable words should convey a lot of information about their meaning (i.e., uniquely pick out a particular meaning). Words with multiple meanings have been shown to be forgettable, but the other side of the word-meaning relationship (whether a meaning can be expressed by multiple words) has not been previously explored. Across two large-scale recognition-memory experiments (2,222 target words and >600 participants each, plus 3,780 participants for the norming experiments), we found that memory performance is overall high, on par with memory for images in similar paradigms. Critically, the most memorable words indeed have a one-to-one relationship with their meanings—with number of synonyms being a stronger contributor than number of meanings—and this property explains >80% of explainable variance in memorability.
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