What factors underlie children's susceptibility to semantic and phonological false memories? Investigating the roles of language skills and auditory short-term memory

Sarah McGeown, Eleanor Gray, Jamey Robinson, Steve Dewhurst

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract / Description of output

Two experiments investigated the cognitive skills that underlie children’s susceptibility to semantic and phonological false memories in the Deese/Roediger–McDermott procedure (Deese, 1959 and Roediger and McDermott, 1995). In Experiment 1, performance on the Verbal Similarities subtest of the British Ability Scales (BAS) II (Elliott, Smith, & McCulloch, 1997) predicted correct and false recall of semantic lures. In Experiment 2, performance on the Yopp–Singer Test of Phonemic Segmentation (Yopp, 1988) did not predict correct recall, but inversely predicted the false recall of phonological lures. Auditory short-term memory was a negative predictor of false recall in Experiment 1, but not in Experiment 2. The findings are discussed in terms of the formation of gist and verbatim traces as proposed by fuzzy trace theory (Reyna & Brainerd, 1998) and the increasing automaticity of associations as proposed by associative activation theory (Howe, Wimmer, Gagnon, & Plumpton, 2009).
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)323-329
JournalCognition
Volume131
Issue number3
Early online date13 Mar 2014
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Jun 2014

Keywords / Materials (for Non-textual outputs)

  • false memory development
  • semantic DRM
  • phonological DRM
  • fuzzy trace theory
  • associative activation theory

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