Memorable words are monogamous: The role of synonymy and homonymy in word recognition memory

What makes a word memorable? Prior research has identified numerous factors: word frequency, concreteness, imageability, and valence have all been shown to affect recognition performance. One important dimension that has not received much attention is the nature of the relationship between words and meanings. Under the hypothesis that words are encoded primarily by their meanings, and not by their surface forms, this relationship should be central to determining word memorability. In particular, rational analysis suggests that people will more easily remember words that convey a large amount of information about their intended meaning and that have few alternatives – that is, memorable words will be those with few possible meanings and synonyms. To test this hypothesis, we ran two large-scale recognition memory experiments (each with 2,222 words, 600+ participants). Memory performance was overall high, on par with memory for pictures in a similar paradigm. Critically, however, not all words were remembered equally well. Consistent with our proposal, the best recognized words had few meanings and few synonyms. Indeed, the most memorable words had a one-to-one relationship with their meanings. Estimates of memorability derived from this rational account explain a large amount of the variance in word memorability.