Politeness and memory for the wording of remarks.
Three experiments were conducted to examine whether people spontaneously remember the wording used to convey politeness. In all experiments, subjects heard statements varying in politeness that had been made by either a high-status (e.g., a professor) or equal-status (e.g., another student) speaker. Subjects' incidental memory for these statements was then tested with either a recognition (Experiments 1 and 3) or a recall (Experiment 2) procedure. As expected, there was evidence of significant memory for wording that conveyed politeness, and subjects were more likely to remember forms that were incongruous with the speaker's status. There was also some evidence that subjects encoded the politeneess of a remark even when they were unable to recall the specific remark. The results demonstrate the role of the interpersonal dimension in the processing of language in context.
Holtgraves
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Department of Psychological Science, Ball State University, Muncie, IN 47306, USA. 00t0holtgrav@bsuvc.bsu.edu
D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D011939:Mental Recall; D012660:Semantics; D012919:Social Behavior; D012930:Social Dominance; D012938:Social Perception; D013067:Speech Perception