Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Does linguistic framing shape memory for consequential events? An influential study by Loftus and Palmer (1974) found that people estimated higher speeds when asked how fast the vehicles involved in an accident were going when they smashed (vs. hit) each other. This finding has proven difficult to replicate, however. Based on a key difference between the original study and previous replications, as well as recent work on linguistic framing, we hypothesized that verbal elaboration and pragmatic inference might moderate this classic effect. In two experiments (N = 1204), participants viewed a brief car accident video. They either wrote a verbal description of the event or did not before answering the verb-framed speed question. Participants who wrote longer descriptions and inferred a greater difference in intensity between the two verb frames were less likely to show the expected framing effect. These findings advance our understanding of how suggestive language influences recollections.