Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Conversations sometimes include speech errors that are repaired. But what do speakers and listeners remember, the error, the repair, or both? In three experiments, we investigated this question by having speakers give instructions for clicking on pictures (Exp 1) or by having listeners follow those instructions by clicking on the referenced pictures (Exps 2 and 3), followed by a surprise recognition test for the spoken words. Results of Exps 1 and 2 showed that both speakers and listeners have better memory for errors than repairs. Exp 3 managed to reverse this pattern by preventing listeners from clicking on the objects that were the referents of speech errors. Collectively, these results suggest superior memory for errors, not when they are simply perceived, but when they are tied to an action.