Semantics and Emotion Contribute to Word Memorability in an Associative Memory Task for Chinese Words

Memorability, an intrinsic property of stimuli, reflects the consistent likelihood of a stimulus being remembered across individuals. Recent research has examined English word memorability in an associative memory task and found that the semantic similarity of a word to other words predicts its memorability, with higher semantic similarity associated with a greater likelihood of successful recall. However, it is unclear whether these findings apply to other languages. Moreover, whether and how emotional content contributes to word memorability has not been fully explored. Of particular interest is emotional consistency: whether emotional words that are of the same or different valence (e.g., positive with positive vs. positive with negative) exhibit a mnemonic advantage over neutral words in associative memory. To address these issues, we examined semantic similarity and emotional consistency as predictors of memory performance in three visually-presented cued-recall experiments using Chinese words. Participants encoded pairs of nouns and were then required to recall target words in response to cue words. We found that both semantic similarity and emotional consistency contributed significantly to word memory: surprisingly, and in contrast to previous work in the English language, words that were more semantically dissimilar were associated with higher memorability; broad emotional consistency (non-neutral cue-target pairs) and positive emotional consistency (positive-positive pairs) both exhibited memory advantages. Notably, our two factors of interest did not interact with each other and demonstrated additive effects when explaining memory performance. Our results provide insights into word memorability, specifically as it relates to the Chinese language, and potential contributions of semantics and emotion.