Word Frequency Affects Hypermnesia

Abstract

Hypermnesia, the tendency of participants to recall more items from a list they have studied when they are asked to recall the list several times on a free-recall test, is enhanced by factors that lead to better performance on free-recall tests. This study tested the hypothesis that words which appear with high frequency in the English language would produce hypermnesia but that low frequency words would not. The activity the 57 participants were required to do between repeated recall tests was also manipulated but had no effect on the number of words recalled. High frequency words resulted in hypermnesia but low frequency words did not.