Access to inner language enhances memory for events.

Abstract

Events are temporally bounded experiences involving people, objects, and actions that can be segmented into sequences of smaller, meaningful events (e.g., steps involved in constructing a piece of furniture), but the role of inner language in remembering such events has been unclear. We investigated whether inner language enhances memory for events in a naturalistic, nonverbal task where participants constructed simple models from memory. Across three experiments, we used linguistic suppression in a dual-task paradigm to test whether inner language improved overall memory performance and completion time, additionally exploring the number of events that could be recalled. We found that access to inner language at encoding consistently affected memory performance: when inner language was disrupted at encoding, participants were poorer at recalling the models and remembered fewer events. This effect was present whether or not the number of events to be recalled exceed event memory capacity (estimated as approximately seven to eight events). Critically, linguistic suppression impaired memory performance to a greater extent than a control secondary task that did not affect access to language; that is, impairment was not solely due to dual-task interference. The results support the proposal that inner language enhances event memory via a mechanism of linguistic bootstrapping, which makes event representation more efficient by allowing more information to be encoded in an event model even when language is not being used in the task. These findings therefore extend theories of event memory and add to a growing body of evidence that inner language is a highly valuable cognitive tool. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).