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We investigated how false recall of words might be affected by the
consistency of the gender of the person speaking the words with the gender of the person listening to the words. Ninety-eight college students listened to eight 15-item word lists presented in a male or female voice. A non-presented lure word was associated with all the presented words on each list. Participants recalled a mean of 3.30 (SD = 1.83) non-presented lure words out of eight possible, for a false recall rate of 41%. False recall was not significantly affected by either speaker gender or listener gender. Contrary to the hypothesis, no interaction was observed between the gender of the speaker and the gender of the listener.
It is now well established that, under certain conditions, people recall hearing words which were not in fact presented to them. Roediger and McDermott (1995) presented word lists to college students and then asked them to recall the words they had heard. Each list contained 12 words, all associated with a target word that was not presented (henceforth referred to as the critical lure). For example, words associated with "chair," such as "table," "sit," and "legs" were presented, but the critical lure, "chair," was not. After listening to each of six such lists, the students were asked to write down all of the words they recalled. The critical lure (e.g., "chair") was recalled 40% of the time despite the fact that it had not been presented. In a recognition test, the students recognized the critical lures as "old" items 84% of the time. In a second experiment, using 15-word lists, Roediger and McDermott reported a false recall rate of 55% for the critical lures and a false recognition rate of 81%. This method is known as the Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm, and the findings have been replicated numerous times (Roediger, Watson, McDermott, & Gallo, 2001).
The probability of falsely recalling critical lures varies considerably. Much of the list-to-list variability in false recall can be explained by list recallability and associative connections from list words to the critical lure (Roediger et al., 2001). However, there has been little investigation of how false recall in this paradigm is related to individual difference factors, such as gender.
Women tend to outperform men on measures of episodic memory ability (Herlitz, Airaksinen, & Nordstrom, 1999; Lewin, Wolgers, & Herlitz, 2001), and because the Deese-Roediger-McDermott paradigm measures episodic memory for the presentation of particular words, we might expect women to be more accurate at recalling which words were presented.
Seamon, Guerry, Marsh, and Tracy (2002) found no gender difference in false recall using the DRM paradigm. This failure to find a gender difference may be due to the fact that the DRM paradigm relies on episodic memory for words, and although there is evidence that women outperform men on tests of verbal memory (Kimura & Clarke, 2002), gender differences in verbal ability appears to be small (Hyde & Linn, 1988). Herlitz et al. (1999) reported that the gender difference in episodic memory could not be explained completely by differences in verbal ability.
Gender may play a role in false recall even if there is no overall gender difference. The purpose of the present study was to determine if false recall of words could be increased by similarity between the voice of the person presenting the words and the internal voice of...
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