Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

What makes some sentences more memorable than others? In this work, we treat the problem of recognizing previously seen sentences as a comparison between a target stimulus and noisy memory representations of previously presented stimuli. Building on past work in image and word memorability, we conduct a large-scale memorability experiment with 500 participants and 2,500 target sentences, eliciting variation in how accurately participants recognize repeated sentences. We predict the memorability of sentences from a) empirically established word-level memorability scores, and b) sentence-level distinctiveness and surprisal features that capture the compositional semantics of sentences. We find that the presence of individually memorable words is highly predictive of sentence memorability, but that sentence-level features also predict sentence memorability – especially in the absence of memorable words. This suggests that otherwise forgettable words can together create memorable compositional meanings that remain in memory and facilitate recognition.