The effects of descriptive forms of speech act in stories on recognition memory

Abstract

A speech act may be described as a sentence corresponding to locutionary act (L-sentence), illocutionary act (I-sentence), or perlocutionary act (P-sentence). The purpose of our research is to examine the effects of descriptive forms of speech acts in stories on recognition memory. Subjects read stories and received unexpected sentence recognition memory test either immediately, an hour later, or four hours later. They rated the degree of confidence of recognition judgement on 7-point scale. The results were as follows: (a) The sentence which had been actually presented in text was recognized correctly with higher confidence, independent of the descriptive forms, (b) The descriptive form in text did not influence the recognition rating by itself, (c) P-sentence tended to be judged as 'not actually presented in text' compared with L-sentence or I-sentence, (d) The recognition time was shortest under the 4-hours-delay condition. These results were discussed in terms of memory representation of sentences and recognition processes.