Gerald Echterhoff, "Language and Memory: Social and Cognitive Processes"...

The possibility that language shapes memory and knowledge has intrigued scholars across various disciplines, including psychology, sociology, philosophy, linguistics, anthropology, and cultural studies. Everyday experiences illustrate how describing an event can lead to distinct mental representations and memories of it. For instance, verbalizing an incident using different expressions can result in different memory representations. Similarly, how an event is labeled in the mass media can evoke varied representations and evaluations, influencing how it's remembered later.

 

In historical contexts, memories of the same events can differ significantly depending on the language used to describe them. For example, nineteenth-century North American events may be remembered differently when labeled as either "the pioneering frontier movement" or "the expulsion and murder of the First Nations." Additionally, linguistic categories influence memory retention; languages lacking specific categories for certain stimuli may result in poorer memory recall compared to languages with more descriptive tools.

 

Language, as a culturally embedded system, not only reflects but also shapes cultural memory. This article explores theoretical approaches, key concepts, and empirical evidence related to the influence of language on memory at the individual and interpersonal levels. While primarily focusing on cognitive processes, it also considers pragmatic functions and social processes inherent in dialogical communication.

 

Foundational Issues: The Relationship between Language and Memory: Memory encompasses various processes and structures that allow past experiences to influence present experiences and behaviors. Language, on the other hand, is considered a symbolic system for representing experiences in a communicable format. The relationship between language and memory can be examined in two ways: how language shapes memory and how memory influences language. This chapter concentrates on the former approach, treating memory as the dependent variable and language as one of the independent variables.

 

Different perspectives exist regarding the relationship between language and cognition. Some argue that language is integral to human thinking and memory, while others believe that cognition transcends language. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis suggests that language determines cognition, while opposing views assert the independence of cognitive processes from linguistic form. These contrasting viewpoints highlight the complex interplay between language and memory.

 

While the positions on the relationship between language and memory may seem contradictory, psychological research suggests a middle ground that provides productive insights into how language shapes memory. On one hand, some cognitive processes seem to operate independently of language. For example, pre-linguistic infants exhibit higher cognitive capacities, and individuals with severe language disorders often retain intact cognitive functions. Additionally, non-verbal modes of cognition, such as visual, spatial, auditory, olfactory, or motor information, play a crucial role in mental representation. Certain memories, termed non-declarative, occur outside conscious awareness and are difficult to verbalize, such as motor skills or implicit influences of previous exposure to stimuli.

 

On the other hand, language is a fundamental tool for interpreting and retaining experiences. Some mental representations are impossible without language, particularly abstract or higher-level concepts. Declarative memory, which includes semantic and episodic memory, is amenable to verbalization, even though episodic memory is often constructed from non-linguistic representations. Thus, while cognition and memory may transcend language in some instances, language remains central to many mental processes.

 

Considering these factors, the debate about whether thought depends on language or vice versa appears futile. Instead, understanding how non-linguistic and linguistic representations interact in the mind is more psychologically relevant. Different research areas on language effects on memory emphasize the role of different levels of representation. For instance, verbal overshadowing examines how memory is influenced when attempting to describe stimuli primarily processed non-linguistically, such as faces or tastes.

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The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis has been influential in stimulating research on the effects of language on cognition. While the strong version of the hypothesis, proposing a causal relationship between language and cognition, has been largely abandoned, weaker versions suggesting a non-deterministic relation are still debated. Studies on color memory, for example, investigate whether differences in color terms across languages affect memory performance for color stimuli. Despite initial skepticism, research has shown that language can indeed influence cognition, particularly for experiences that are abstract or culturally mediated. Therefore, understanding the interplay between language and memory involves considering how linguistic structures shape cognitive processes across different domains.

 

In a related area of research, scholars have explored how bilingualism, the ability to use two languages regularly in daily life, influences memory. In a study by Marian and Neisser, Russian-English bilinguals recalled more experiences from their Russian-speaking period when interviewed in Russian, and vice versa when interviewed in English. This suggests that the linguistic environment during retrieval influences memory accessibility, aligning with the concept of context-dependent memory. This phenomenon indicates that belonging to different language communities can shape how individuals remember their personal past, with potential implications for cultural memory.

 

Moving on to within-language approaches, linguistic differences within the same language can also impact memory. Various studies have examined how verbalization affects memory encoding and retrieval. Verbalization can either enhance or hinder memory, depending on factors such as the ease of verbal description and the nature of the stimuli. For example, verbalizing complex visual stimuli may interfere with memory accuracy, while providing verbal labels for stimuli can shape mental representation and subsequent memory. Additionally, differences in the way people encode or retrieve information verbally can lead to biases in memory recall.

 

Pragmatic aspects of communication, such as audience tuning and socially shared reality, also influence memory. Audience tuning refers to the process of adjusting language use based on the audience's perspective, knowledge, and attitudes. Studies employing the saying-is-believing paradigm have demonstrated that aligning language with the audience's attitudes can not only bias speakers' messages but also affect their subsequent memory and cognitive representations of the message topic. This phenomenon suggests that communicators may end up believing and remembering what they said to align with their audience's attitudes, rather than the original information they learned.

Crucially, the impact of audience-tuning on memory appears to be heavily influenced by the motives and context of interpersonal communication. Echterhoff and colleagues suggest that such effects arise when communicators jointly construct a socially shared reality with their audience regarding the topic or target. Shared reality imbues previously uncertain representations of experience with subjective validity and is indicated by individuals' trust in the co-constructor(s). In this view, communicators reduce uncertainty about the target person by considering the audience's attitude when crafting a message about them. Supporting this shared-reality perspective, research by Echterhoff, Higgins, Kopietz, and Groll demonstrated memory biases when audience tuning aimed at creating shared reality, but not when motivated by non-epistemic goals such as obtaining a monetary incentive. Moreover, communicators tuning to an in-group audience, whom they trusted as appropriate co-constructors, incorporated the audience-tuned view into their memory, while those addressing an out-group audience, whom they distrusted, did not. Notably, overt verbal messages and message content at recall did not vary between shared-reality conditions. Instead, what differed was the communicators' perception of the validity of their message in conveying a genuine view about the target. Thus, mere differences in verbal descriptions or linguistic representations may not always suffice for effects on subsequent memory. Instead, communicators' motives and relationship with the audience play a critical role in shaping their mental representations of the topic.

 

This research also carries implications for the formation of cultural knowledge. Verbal communication can subtly disseminate knowledge, memories, and beliefs when individuals actively engage as communicators, not just passive recipients, provided they adhere to common rules such as audience tuning and jointly create a shared reality with their communication partners. Within homogeneous groups or communities where members consider each other trustworthy co-constructors of reality in the face of uncertainty, such communication may reinforce and even amplify existing worldviews, including prevalent cultural stereotypes. Consequently, it may contribute to conflict with out-groups. Future research should aim to further integrate these cognitive, motivational, and socio-cultural dimensions to elucidate how verbal communication shapes memory and knowledge.