8

… And Making Memories Work for You

Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me

One well-studied memory phenomenon is the tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) state. This refers to situations in which you know you know something, and can almost retrieve it, but for some reason, you can’t quite produce it. The researchers Roger Brown and David McNeill likened a TOT state to “mild torment, something like the brink of a sneeze.”¹ You’ve undoubtedly had to endure conversations with friends in which they verbally flail in their attempts to produce something like the name of an actor. “You know, he was the guy who was in those Superman movies back in the Seventies … and then he was thrown from a horse, and was paralyzed, and then later he created a research foundation … you know, he was really tall and good looking … what was his name??” (Just in case we’ve caused a TOT state for you, this example refers to Christopher Reeve.)

TOT states have received considerable attention from cognitive scientists because of their paradoxical nature: how is it possible to recall so much information about someone, but not the name? Fortunately, it’s fairly easy to cause research participants to experience TOT states in the lab. Brown and McNeill discovered that if they gave their subjects dictionary definitions of rare or unusual words, they could frequently trigger the TOT state.

Before describing Brown and McNeill’s results, let’s see if we can put you in such a state. Below are a series of definitions based on their original items. After reading each one, assess what you’re experiencing. There are three possibilities:

(a) You have no idea what’s being described, and no feeling of familiarity. Remember that these are rare and unusual terms, so this may happen rather frequently. Just move on to the next item.

(b) You know that you know the object or concept being described, and can state its name out loud. In this case, you can congratulate yourself on your formidable vocabulary, and move on to the next item.

(c) You think that you might know the word, but you can’t articulate it. If you find yourself in this state, we’d like you to guess (1) whether the word you can’t remember is long or short; (2) how many syllables it has; and (3) what the first letter of the word might be. Even if you’re not at all certain, just guess.

Ready? Here’s the first definition (you’ll find the answers at the end of this section). If you’re in a TOT state, be sure to write down your guesses about length, number of syllables, and first letter.

1. What is the name of the small boat seen in the rivers and harbors of Asia, propelled by oars and typically with a roof covered in woven mats?

2. What is the name for the semicircular, vaulted area at one end of a church?

3. What is term for showing favor in business or politics for members of one’s own family?

4. What is the name of the staff encircled by two snakes used as the symbol of the medical profession?

5. What is the term for getting money or favors through intimidation or the threat of violence?

6. What is the term for assembling people for a common purpose, such as a meeting or a conference?

7. What is another name for a stamp collector?

8. What is the term for displaying excessive flattery or an ingratiating demeanor?

9. What is the name of the navigational instrument used for measuring angular distances, especially the sun, moon, and stars at sea?

10. What is the name of the cavity at the end of a bird’s digestive track?

We’re hoping that you experienced a TOT state after reading one or more of these definitions. If you did, were you able to come up with information about the word itself?

Brown and McNeill provided Harvard undergraduates with such definitions, and found that they reported TOT states about 13 percent of the time. When the results were analyzed, Brown and McNeill found that the participants performed well above chance with regard to the three questions. Short words were believed to be short, the estimated length in syllables was frequently correctly recalled, and on many occasions, the first letter of the word was produced.

Even the errors from this study are of interest. For example, some participants produced the word sexton for the next to last definition above. “Sexton” (grave digger) is far removed from the concept of a navigational instrument, but identical to sextant in terms of length and number of syllables. They also share the same sounds. These observations provided researchers with valuable clues about the organization of long-term memory: it seems that words that sound alike may be stored near each other in long-term memory, and that certain attributes of concepts may be available even when others are not.

The adult foreign language learner can take away a number of important messages from this research. First, it should be comforting to realize that even Harvard undergraduates experience tip-of-the-tongue states, so you shouldn’t get frustrated when this happens to you. In fact, so-called diary studies, in which participants are asked to record their TOT experiences, have found that these states increase from about once a week for younger adults to about once a day for older adults.²

Once again, these discoveries can be viewed negatively or positively, depending on one’s perspective. It certainly is the case that such episodes become more frequent across the lifespan, but their presence should not be taken as evidence of a wholesale decline in memory. Although having a lot of knowledge does not seem to cause more TOT states, it should be reassuring, nevertheless, to know that when TOT states do occur, it’s because the sought-after word is in fact present in memory, even if it can’t be retrieved right away.³ Such experiences often occur right before the word enters into conscious awareness, so if you believe that the term is on the “tip of your tongue,” it really might be—you just need to be patient enough to allow it to make its appearance.

Answers to the tip-of-the-tongue questions:

1. Sampan (some people think of junk for this definition as well).

2. Apse.

3. Nepotism.

4. Caduceus.

5. Extortion.

6. Convene.

7. Philatelist.

8. Fawning.

9. Sextant.

10. Cloaca.

Practice Makes Perfect?

A major part of foreign language mastery is practicing reading, writing, speaking, and listening in the new language. For many, the prospect of intensive practice will evoke memories of rote drills in a high school Spanish or French course. Most students find such exercises to be pure drudgery, and they can drain away all of one’s interest in the subject.

Practice, however, really is an essential part of this enterprise, even if it seems daunting. It may be helpful to reflect on your goals for learning a foreign language. Remember, to do many things in a foreign language you do not need native-like fluency. For example, if your primary motivation for learning Swedish is to exchange pleasantries with you wife’s extended family, then spending months in intensive study would be overkill. But to even do this, practice is an important part of the story. Our goal in this section is to review the cognitive science research on practice and expertise, and to offer some concrete suggestions about how to make the time spent on practice as efficient and productive as possible. You will learn how to work smarter, not harder.

What does it mean to be an expert? You may be surprised to learn that the study of expertise is an entire subfield within cognitive science. Researchers have studied individuals from diverse fields of accomplishment in order to understand how expertise is acquired. In the course of writing this book, we’ve spoken to many people who have asserted that they simply aren’t good at foreign language learning; however, they based this perception on negative experiences in high school or college. This kind of reasoning illustrates a commonly held belief—that doing something badly once means to be bad at it forever, creating the conditions for a negative self-fulfilling prophecy.

One domain of extensive study has been chess playing. It’s easy to identify chess experts, because good players will have a numeric ranking that objectively measures how good they are. There are a variety of such systems (the Elo and USCF systems are two of these), but the basics are the same. If you have a higher rating than I do, and I play and beat you, then my rating goes up a little bit, and yours goes down. Over years of play in many matches and tournaments, a small subset of chess players will achieve titles like “grandmaster.” Many of these individuals have been studied, and it turns out that they’re nothing like what you might expect.

The common stereotype of the chess grandmaster is someone who possesses very high intelligence and an incredible memory. They are thought to play chess well because they can see dozens of moves ahead into a game. (They might also be thought of as obsessive and antisocial, but those parts of the stereotype aren’t relevant for our purposes.) When researchers began to study chess grandmasters in the 1940s, they discovered that these people often have average intelligence, and normal memory for everything but chess. They also don’t have some master plan for a game consisting of dozens of moves. Because they can’t anticipate every possible countermove by an opponent, it isn’t feasible for them to implement such long-term strategies.

However, when these experts’ memory skills are tested within the domain of chess, their extraordinary abilities quickly become evident. When briefly presented with a position that had occurred in a real game, chess experts can recreate that position on a second board quickly and accurately, even if that involves the placement of one or two dozen pieces on their respective squares. Novice chess players, as you might expect, perform poorly at this task.⁴

How are the chess experts able to perform such feats? An important part of the story seems to be chunking, or the grouping of disparate objects into meaningful patterns, as we discussed in the previous chapter. For example, a very common pattern that occurs over and over in chess games is for the king to be placed behind a row of three pawns. The novice chess player would have to remember this by remembering four separate items in working memory. The expert, by contrast, can remember that pattern as a single chunk, which greatly increases his or her working memory capacity. Perhaps most importantly, both chess experts and novices perform poorly when the board to be recreated has been populated by chess pieces placed randomly. In this situation, the chess experts can’t rely on chunking to aid them.

Researchers have also tried to estimate how many groupings of pieces a chess expert can recognize instantly. It’s thought that the “vocabulary” of the expert is between 50,000 and 100,000 patterns. It’s also been estimated that it requires about 10,000 hours of study and practice to acquire this vocabulary. Interestingly, this number is consistent with the amount of time required to achieve expertise in a number of disciplines, a finding that has been popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in his book Outliers. However, a recent overview of this literature by Brooke Macnamara and colleagues suggests the effects of deliberate practice vary widely by domain.⁵

A belief that deliberate practice is the key has caused some to claim that there really isn’t a fundamental difference between experts and nonexperts. Experts are simply individuals who, because of their intense interest and love of a subject, have put in the time necessary to achieve a very high level of performance. Although this conclusion is controversial, it does provide some hope for those of us who wish to acquire expertise. It’s heartening to think that expertise is ultimately achievable by virtually anyone.

What’s that? You’re saying that you don’t have 10,000 hours to spare to learn a foreign language? Remember that you don’t need to become an expert to achieve a very useful amount of fluency. But you will still need to practice, and research has shed some light on this topic as well.

Before reading any further, we’d like you to participate in a simple experiment. We’d like you to estimate how many classmates’ names you can remember from your high school graduating class (first and last names). Perhaps you’re thinking that you can name two-thirds of your classmates, or at least half of them. Now take out a sheet of paper, and try to write the names down. Go ahead, we’ll wait.

If you actually attempted this experiment, you’re probably disappointed at how few names you were able to produce. You were undoubtedly able to immediately scribble down the names of close friends and well-known class personalities, and perhaps a few others. But most people will find that they’ve created a fairly short list.

This experiment was first conducted by memory researcher Harry Bahrick. He was interested in studying very long-term memory—the things that we remember across decades of our lives. The difficulty with exploring this topic is that most of us don’t have extensive records to determine whether our memories are complete or accurate. If we were to ask you what you had for lunch on November 5, 2009, you probably have no way of checking whether you consumed a salad or a sandwich.

Bahrick got around this problem when he realized that almost everyone has detailed records from their late teenage years: their high school yearbooks. He asked a number of individuals to bring their yearbooks to his lab (without looking at them first), and then asked them to carry out tasks like the one you just did: to recall as many of their classmates’ names as they could.

If you really did attempt our exercise, then perhaps Bahrick’s results won’t come as a shock to you. He found that, for an older group of participants who had, on average, graduated from high school forty-eight years earlier, just 6 percent of the total classmates’ names were recalled. Intriguingly, however, he found that, for a group who had graduated quite recently (on average, three months earlier), performance wasn’t much better: just 15 percent of the classmates’ names were recalled.⁶

At one level, this is deeply unsettling. After all, these are the people that we laughed and cried with during a very important part of our lives. But even more than that, the result just doesn’t feel right: surely we can remember more of our classmates than that. And that intuition is correct. When Bahrick asked his participants to simply recognize which of four names belonged to a high school classmate, performance was excellent. For those who had graduated three months earlier, name recognition was 90 percent. And recognition remained at very high levels (80–90 percent) for up to thirty-five years following graduation.

The message to take away from this study is that the assessment of memory depends critically on how memory is measured. You really didn’t forget your classmate’s names: you simply became less able to spontaneously recall them. However, you can still pick out a classmate’s name when it is placed with others that are unfamiliar to you.

Bahrick conducted a similar experiment on memory for high school Spanish.⁷ Even though participants in this study had a difficult time recalling a Spanish word when given only the English word as a prompt, they could still pick out the correct Spanish word on a multiple choice test. This result occurred for individuals who had studied Spanish up to thirty years prior to the experiment; however, it also depended on how much Spanish they had studied and how well they had performed in the courses. In other words, the longer someone had studied Spanish, and the better their grades had been, the more likely they were to retain the information.⁷

To account for this impressive performance, Bahrick proposed the concept of permastore for memories that are extremely durable, resistant to forgetting, and that can last for more than twenty-five years. He suggested that memories acquired over a long period of time are more likely to end up in a permastore state. However, for information to end up in permastore, two conditions must be met.

First, the information must be overlearned. For example, Bahrick asked participants to pick out the meaning of the Spanish word feliz. They had to choose from among the English words happy, fault, feet, new, or clean. Because feliz is such a common word in Spanish, students were probably exposed to it repeatedly. That is, feliz is likely to have been a Spanish word that was overlearned, and therefore, the meaning of feliz was less likely to have been forgotten. (Feliz means “happy” in case you were wondering.)

Overlearning was first described by Ebbinghaus, and a large body of subsequent research has underscored its importance. So if you are trying to learn vocabulary terms and believe that you’ve memorized them, you would be well advised to continue reviewing these terms periodically even after you have the subjective impression that you know them. Overlearning will help you to put these words in your permastore.

We have already briefly mentioned the other component that is necessary for permastore, which is distributed practice. Distributed practice means that exposure is spaced out over time. Returning to high school once again, you may recall neglecting the content of a particular course, and then staying up all night to cram for an exam. Although this sort of learning can be effective over the short term, and is better than not studying at all, it seldom leads to the formation of durable memories.⁸ For example, if you are going to spend ten hours studying a foreign language over the next week, you’d be much better off studying for ninety minutes a day rather than studying for five hours on two days. Although five hours spent studying over two days is better than not studying at all, it’s also not the best use of your time. When it comes to practice and retaining information over a long period of time, just remember: Slow and steady wins the race.

Take It Personally

Imagine that you’re taking part in a psychology experiment. You’ve been told to read and comprehend target words as they appear, one by one, on a computer screen. You’re also asked to answer a question about each of these words. Let’s say the word selfish appears on the screen, and you are asked “Is the word printed in capital letters?” Obedient participant that you are, you press the “yes” button. Other participants might see selfish and be asked, “Does the word rhyme with weight?” (in this case, no), or “Is the word a type of fish?” (again, no). Finally, some participants might be asked, “Does this word describe you?” After responding to a series of such word and question pairs, you are then given a task you weren’t expecting. You are asked to recognize as many of the target words as you can.

Do you think the questions you were asked might have an effect on which words you were able to recall? If you have good memory for the previous discussion on levels of processing, the answer would be yes. As you might expect, questions about whether words were printed in capital letters led to relatively poor rates of recognition for those target words. Likewise, questions about whether two words rhymed also resulted in unimpressive performance. As we noted before, in both cases, this is to be expected, because these questions were answered using shallow processing. On the other hand, memory performance was better when participants had to think more deeply about the word (e.g., recognizing that selfish is not a type of fish). But the participants best remembered those words when they thought about the words in relation to themselves. This phenomenon is called the self-reference effect.⁹

But is the self-reference effect really the result of being asked to consider words in relation just to oneself, or might a similar effect be obtained if the words were related to any person? Follow-up research used a self-reference condition like the one we just described, but also employed an “other-reference” condition. The idea was to have participants think about the words in relation to a familiar individual, but not someone they personally knew. For many of these studies, the go-to other person was Johnny Carson, the talk show host who had appeared on television every weeknight since the early 1960s. This was someone who would have been instantly recognizable to the participants, but probably not someone they knew very much about. (Carson, unlike many of today’s celebrities, was fairly circumspect.) When the researchers compared the participants’ recognition of the trait words in the two conditions, they found that words thought about in relation to oneself were better remembered than the words thought about in relation to Carson. In other words, the effect really is a self-reference effect, and not just a consequence of thinking about whether particular traits describe any one person.¹⁰

The self-reference effect has been explained in several ways, and the arguments tend to be complementary rather than opposing. The first has to do with the emotional dimension of the trait words. It probably doesn’t matter to you, one way or another, whether Johnny Carson was selfish or incredibly generous. However, when thought about in relation to yourself, the question will engender a variety of emotions (perhaps pride about what a philanthropist you are, or guilty regret that you throw away all those appeals from charity that you receive in the mail).

A second and perhaps more important explanation has to do with the nature of the self. You may now be struggling to learn a foreign language, but you can take some solace from the following fact: you are an expert on at least one subject, and that is the story of your life. In fact, you know more about yourself than anyone who has ever lived. Although this may seem a bit narcissistic, it is undoubtedly true, and it has important consequences for memory. When we’re asked if the word selfish describes us, we are able to think about the question by drawing upon specific autobiographical memories, such as last week when you treated your colleague to lunch (“See! I’m not selfish!”), or your unwillingness to buy cookies from the Girl Scout who appeared at your door last month (“Well, maybe I am, a little bit”). In the case of Johnny Carson, you probably aren’t able to recall specific episodes of generosity or stinginess. Researchers have described the self as “a well-developed and often-used construct.” In fact, the self-reference effect is so strong that we are more likely to remember the birthdays of others if those birthdays fall close to our own.¹¹

It’s possible to profit from the self-reference effect in a variety of ways. So the news here is good indeed. By attempting to learn a foreign language later in life, you can draw upon your extensive life experiences as rich retrieval cues for committing to memory the elements of a second language. Of course, not all concepts you need to remember lend themselves easily to self-reference. But thinking deep thoughts is much better overall than processing information shallowly. When you can use it, self-reference will be there as one of the arrows in your cognitive quiver.

Emotional Aspects of Memory

It probably comes as no surprise that the ability to learn a new language is affected by one’s mood and emotional state. Cognitive scientists have studied the links between memory, mood, and emotion. This section explores how to create an emotional environment that will facilitate pleasurable and effective foreign language learning.

Think Positive

In exploring the link between thinking and feeling, one basic tenet to keep in mind is that positive information is processed more efficiently and is remembered better and longer than negative information. The superiority of positive over negative information has been shown repeatedly in a wide range of studies, including ones that looked at memory for vocabulary words, grammatical structures, and the content of dialogue and text. This bias toward positive information may be of particular importance (and perhaps relief) to the adult learner because it has also been shown that unpleasant memories weaken over time. Margaret Matlin and David Stang called the overall trend for cognitive systems to favor positive information the Pollyanna principle, named after the little girl who in the popular books and movies focuses on the bright side of life in even the most depressing circumstances.¹²

Of course, it would be impossible to achieve any level of mastery in a language by studying only positive vocabulary words or by producing only affirmative sentences. However, because positive linguistic features are easier to process, remember, and recall than negative ones, when it comes to doing things with the language—such as telling a story, making a presentation, or engaging in conversation—you will give yourself an advantage if you approach these activities from a positive standpoint. For example, it will be easier for you to create in your target language a sentence like “The president is a woman” than it will be to create the sentence “The president is not a man.” It will also be easier for your audience to understand what you are trying to say, since listeners also process positive information more easily than negative information.

Be Specific

When Richard was a student, he would study for tests in the same classroom and the same seat where he learned the material and where he would later take the test (nerd alert!). Before a test, he would go to the classroom at night and write his notes on the blackboard. Then he would sit in his seat and study the board, so that on the day of the test, if he had trouble remembering something, he could visualize what he had written on the board in hopes of recalling the information. What Richard was trying to do, without knowing it at the time, was to take advantage of a cognitive phenomenon called encoding specificity.

Encoding specificity refers to the fact that memory improves when the context in which you learned material (the encoding) matches the context in which you are asked to remember the material.¹³ Conversely, when these contexts do not match, memory ability can suffer. Perhaps this has happened to you. You may have found that you are great at remembering vocabulary words in the classroom and can pass a test with ease. But as soon as you try to apply these words in a real-life setting, they seem to vanish into thin air. When this happens, don’t blame your age: blame encoding specificity. The problem arises when there is a mismatch between where and how you learned the words and where and how you want to use them.

Keep in mind too that context does not only mean your external surroundings. Although many studies have measured encoding specificity by manipulating external features like where the material is learned, other characteristics such as one’s internal affective state are also susceptible to encoding specificity. For example, people who learn a list of words when they have been drinking do better on recall after drinking again than when they are sober. Also, some veterans of the Gulf War exhibit more negative symptoms of PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) near the anniversary of the their initial traumatic event.¹⁴

One’s mood also influences the ability to recall information. In general, memory improves if the mood when the material was learned matches the mood when the material was recalled.¹⁵ For example, when you are angry it’s easier to remember other events or situations that also made you angry. Such mood-dependent memories may be one reason why during an argument a person brings up prior anger-inducing events—even if they have nothing to do with the situation at hand.

Mood-dependent learning would predict that being calm and relaxed in class, but anxious and worried during an exam, will lead to impaired test performance. We don’t recommend that you make yourself anxious and worried in class. Rather, if you end up recalling the information better in class than on a test, keep in mind that it’s a not a reflection of your age or overall cognitive ability, but merely a consequence of encoding specificity. It’s normal and happens to people of all ages, so don’t become discouraged!

Of course, it’s impossible to study information in every possible context and mood in order to avoid memory lapses due to encoding specificity or mood-dependence. However, there are several things that adult language learners can do to make encoding specificity work for them, or at least to lessen its influence. One method would be to learn the language in a way that is as close as possible to how you will eventually use it.

For example, at one point when Richard was studying Portuguese, he was living in Iceland. He went to Brazil for a month of intensive study and then returned to Iceland where he took a telephone test in Portuguese. He failed it. But since he was a cognitive scientist, he thought about what had gone wrong and was determined to try again. So he returned to Brazil for a second round of studying, but this time he tried to match the internal and external encoding context with what he knew he would have to do during the phone test. He even spoke to his Portuguese teacher by phone to practice. He took the phone test again—this time while he was still in Brazil—and passed, which enabled him to join the Foreign Service. Not surprisingly, however, when he took the language test in person (which is required to make sure that the person who takes the phone test is the same person who shows up at work), he did not score as well—since of course the live test was contextually quite different, and he was not proficient enough to be free of context effects. He did score high enough, however, so that the testers knew he hadn’t been cheating.

Be Expansive

Although encoding specificity is real—even for native speakers—most of us strive for a level of linguistic proficiency that is not so heavily dependent on context. To do this, it is important to vary where, when, and how we learn and study a language. In other words, to lessen the impact of encoding specificity, take advantage of the distributed practice effect. If you have two hours to study, it is better to study for one hour, then take a break by doing something completely different, and then come back and study the material again. Although distributed practice is specific to time, we suggest that you should study the material again in different contexts as well. That doesn’t mean to study your notes at home and then study your notes in the library. Rather, you might want to study your notes for an hour, then meet a native speaker with whom you can practice the words you’ve just been studying in a conversation.

Keep in mind that with distributed practice, each time you return to the material, you will do worse than you had been doing when you left off previously. Not only is this normal, but it is exactly what you want to happen. That’s because the goal of distributed practice is to give yourself the opportunity to forget and then relearn the material at a new time. Since relearning is faster than learning, each time you forget something and then relearn it, you reinforce the material in a slightly different way. If you vary the place where you relearn the material as well, you will lessen the specificity of the previous encoding, allowing you to use the language more fluidly in a variety of situations.

Not only that, but taking time away from your studies will allow what are called incubation effects to occur. That is, stepping back from a task has been shown, paradoxically, to lead to better problem solving and creativity. Evidence also suggests that even sleep and dreaming promote incubation effects. And not to put too fine a point on it, but don’t forget the phenomenon of release from proactive interference mentioned earlier.¹⁶

So what’s the bottom line? Relax. Be sure to study, but when you find yourself getting confused or no longer improving, stop. Do something else—anything else. You might even want to sleep on it. When you come back to the material, you may be surprised at how much you actually remember.

A Little Knowledge Is a Dangerous, Yet Helpful, Thing

Adult language learners possess an array of highly organized knowledge structures that can serve to aid memory in a top-down, conceptually driven way. By the same token, it is important to recognize that preexisting knowledge structures can create expectations that could be problematic. Consider what happened to Roger.

Famished and exhausted, Roger had just arrived at his destination: a small city in eastern Switzerland. It was his first trip to Europe as an adult, and after two long flights and a journey by train, his top priority was finding something to eat. He entered the first restaurant he found, and waited impatiently to be seated. After a while, it became apparent that he was being ignored. He began to pace back and forth a bit, and tried to make himself as conspicuous as possible. Then he realized he wasn’t being ignored any longer. The wait staff of the restaurant had gathered at the back. They were eyeing him with some concern, and holding an animated discussion. Finally, one of the servers approached him, and asked, with some degree of trepidation, “What do you want?” Amazed by this question, Roger blurted out “I want to eat!” Now it was the server’s turn to be astonished. “If you want to eat, then sit down!” Roger meekly followed her instruction, and was soon enjoying his meal.

Later in his visit, he picked out a couple of books at a bookstore. He took his selections to the cashier, who proceeded to ring them up. After totaling the price, she looked at him expectantly. He, in turn, looked expectantly back at her. After a moment, it became clear that both of them were waiting for the other to do something. With barely controlled exasperation, she informed Roger of the total price—the same amount clearly visible to him on the front of the cash register. She spoke to him slowly, loudly, and distinctly, the way you might address a not-so-bright child. Chastened, he paid for his purchases and beat a hasty retreat.

Before Roger began this trip, he had been feeling rather smug about his ability to cope with the rigors of foreign travel. Unlike the stereotypical “ugly American,” who expects everyone to speak English, his knowledge of German was serviceable, and he had made a point of practicing the language well in advance of his trip. He had memorized the requisite tourist expressions in his phrasebook. He had read the relevant sections in a couple of guidebooks for the region. In short, he felt well prepared for interacting with the locals. His subsequent difficulties with tasks as basic as restaurant dining and book buying, therefore, were more than a little disconcerting.

So, what was the cause of Roger’s problems? Could he blame jet lag, or the unaccustomed altitude, or the Swiss work force? As you may have guessed by now, his difficulties arose because of a mismatch between Roger’s expectations and the expectations of the servers and cashier. The confusion at the restaurant was the result of his experience dining in the United States. Almost invariably, patrons are greeted by a server, or a prominent sign will instruct them to “Please seat yourself” or “Please wait to be seated.” In Switzerland, however, no guidance is required, because everyone knows that they should seat themselves. Roger’s confusion at the bookstore stemmed from having previously made countless purchases in which the local sales tax was added to the sale price to arrive at a final total. This tax varies by state and even from city to city in the United States, so no one tries to calculate it in advance—you simply wait to be informed of the grand total. In Switzerland, however, taxes are already included in the sale price, so the steps he was waiting for—the addition of the sales tax, and then the announcement of the total—would not occur. Despite his best efforts, Roger had become what he had fervently hoped to avoid: a clueless American abroad.

Roger’s training as a cognitive scientist (and perhaps his wounded pride) led him to reflect on these experiences, and to think about them from the perspective of his Swiss hosts. In hindsight, it was apparent why his behavior had mystified the wait staff at the restaurant. In their eyes, he clearly wasn’t there to eat, because if he had been, he would have sat down. He didn’t seem to be waiting for anyone else—he never glanced at his watch or back at the entrance, for example. And his impatience and pacing only unnerved them further. In a similar way, the cashier at the bookstore couldn’t figure out what he was waiting for: the amount that he was required to pay was displayed in large numbers just a few inches from his eyes.

Psychologists have a name for such mismatching expectations: they’re called script errors. A script is one’s mental checklist for events and the order in which they occur. For Americans, the “dining at a restaurant” script would include at least fourteen steps:

1. Enter the restaurant.

2. Seat oneself or wait to be seated (as indicated).

3. Receive menus from the server, and place drink orders.

4. Decide on what food to order.

5. Wait.

6. Give the food order to the server.

7. Wait.

8. Food is prepared and brought to the table by the server.

9. Eat the food.

10. Wait.

11. Receive the check and pay for the food and tip.

12. Wait.

13. Receive the receipt from the server.

14. Exit the restaurant.

This is all blindingly obvious, right? And yet, we’re also aware of the subtle and not-so-subtle variations that exist for this script. At a fast food restaurant, for example, one can jump directly from step 1 to step 6, and the food must be paid for before it is consumed. Tipping is not expected, unless there is a very prominent tip jar on the counter. And if someone took a seat at a McDonald’s and waited to be served, they would probably end up waiting for a very long time. At many diners and Chinese restaurants in the United States, there is another deviation from the standard script: the check is brought to the table, but the patron must then take it to the counter in order to pay.

So Roger’s difficulty at the Swiss restaurant was caused by his assumption that the choice point at step 2 of his dining script was universal. The Swiss wait staff can shoulder some of the blame as well—they were apparently unaware that in their restaurant script, step 2 (Always seat yourself)—is not universal.

We all possess many, many scripts (also called schemata) for actions that we engage in repeatedly. These scripts form part of what psychologists refer to as semantic memory, or our general world knowledge. Scripts and schemata are mental frameworks that are based on our shared cultural experiences. As such, they form part of the common ground we use when we communicate. Scripts enable the quick and effortless processing of information, but as Roger’s experiences in Switzerland demonstrate, adhering too closely to a script can be dangerous.¹⁷

These concepts were first investigated by the British experimental psychologist Frederic Bartlett. His research during the 1920s convinced him that the act of remembering involved reconstructing a previous experience, based on the information that is easily retrieved. Any gaps in this retrieval are filled in with inferences based on our existing schemata.¹⁸

Bartlett came to these conclusions by studying the recall of stories he gave to participants who were undergraduates at Cambridge University. He made a point of using narratives drawn from less familiar cultures in an attempt to see this “gap filling” process at work. In his most well-known research, he used a Native American legend called “The War of the Ghosts.” From a British perspective, the story involves many hard–to-understand elements: it’s not clear, for example, whether the aforementioned war is fought with the living or with the dead. It also includes many details that would have been part of the Native Americans’ schemata, but not that of Bartlett’s participants. For example, the story contains reference to two boys engaged in seal catching, and paddling in canoes. When asked to recall this story at a later time, many participants reported that the boys had been fishing, or had been in boats.

According to Bartlett’s reasoning, although his participants were unable to remember exactly what the boys had been up to, they could vaguely remember that they had been standing at the water’s edge. They were doing something, but they couldn’t remember what it was. What would one do at the edge of a river? Using their schematic knowledge, the participants filled in the gap by “remembering” that the boys had been fishing.

Just like the Cambridge undergraduates, it’s possible that when you are learning a new language (which includes the culture), you may rely on a script or schema from your native language to fill in the gaps. For example, Americans end most of their casual conversations with the phrase “Have a nice day,” which is part of the US script for closing a conversation. When Americans study a foreign language they often want to learn how to say, “Have a nice day” even though to end a conversation this way is odd in many other cultures. However, for an American, stopping a conversation after “thank you” or “you’re welcome” can feel like something is missing. To fill in the gap the American may look for an alternative phrase that, although not strictly needed in the target language, does not sound odd and will give the American the sense of closure they expect because of their script.

The Art of Memory

The Roman orator Cicero tells the story of Simonides of Ceos who narrowly escaped a gruesome death. The Greek lyric poet, who lived in the fifth century BC, had offended Scopas, a nobleman of Thessaly, by composing a victory ode that was not to his liking. Scopas was irritated by the inclusion of an extended decorative passage concerning the mythological twins Castor and Pollux. While dining in a banquet hall with Scopas, Simonides was suddenly summoned outside by two young men. At that moment, the roof of the dining hall collapsed, and Scopas and a number of his relatives were killed. In addition, the summoning visitors were nowhere to be found. According to legend, the two young men were said to be—you guessed it—Castor and Pollux, who saved Simonides’s life in gratitude for their inclusion in his poem.

When the hall was excavated, it was discovered that the bodies of the dinner guests had been crushed beyond recognition, making it impossible to identify the remains for burial. Simonides was summoned and asked if he could help. He was able to figure out who was who by remembering where the various guests had been seated around the table before he left the building.¹⁹ Recognizing the utility of this technique as an aid to remembering, Simonides is said to have gone on to develop the memory aid now referred to as the method of loci (loci is the plural of the Latin word locus, meaning “place” or “location”). It is also sometimes referred to as the Memory Palace technique or the memory theater. No matter what it is called, the idea is the same: a familiar location or route is used as a cue to remember a list of items in a specific order. This technique exemplifies one of the major themes of this book: you can take advantage of what you already know to learn something new, such as vocabulary in your target language.

Imagine that you want to remember to buy bagels, milk, and eggs for tomorrow’s breakfast. In your mind’s eye, you can “drive” a familiar route, such as your daily commute to the office, to help you remember your grocery list. As you pass familiar landmarks, you can associate them with the items you need to buy. If your route takes you past a church with a tall steeple, for example, you could imagine a gigantic bagel speared by the church’s spire. If your commute includes driving past a tall apartment building, you could imagine milk running down the building’s sides and forming puddles on the ground. And the eggs can be remembered by making use of the golf course near the end of your commute. Just form a mental picture of a gigantic egg cracking down the middle, and disgorging golfers onto the links. When you enter the grocery store, all you’ll have to do is hop in your mental vehicle and drive to work. As you pass the church, apartment tower, and golf course, you’ll “see” the items on your list.

Of course, in this example, it’s not important that you remember the grocery list in a particular order. However, the technique can be used in this way, because in your mental commute you always drive by the church first, then the apartment building, and finally the golf course. Throughout antiquity, Greek and Roman orators used the method to remember the points to be made in a speech in their proper order. There are a number of other techniques besides the method of loci to aid in remembering. Collectively, such mental manipulations are also referred to as mnemonic devices, and we’ll briefly describe several additional examples, although there are many others.²⁰

The method of loci is helpful because all you need to do is associate the items to be remembered with something you already know (a familiar route). But if you’re willing to learn a simple poem, you can acquire another powerful memory technique:

One is run,

two is shoe,

three is tree,

four is door

and so on …

This is the peg system, in which words that rhyme with or sound like the cardinal numbers are used like the route in the method of loci. (This poem has many variations—the truncated version shown here is the one that Roger was taught as a young child by his father.)

Now let’s go back to the shopping list. With one is run, imagine a horse racing along a racetrack, but instead of carrying a jockey, there’s an enormous bagel in the saddle. For two is shoe, imagine milk in one’s shoes, or perhaps leaking out of them with every step. For three, the item to be remembered can take the place of branches or leaves on a tree. So to finish off this three-item grocery list, imagine an egg tree, with brightly colored Easter eggs taking the place of leaves. The exact form of the mental imagery doesn’t really matter. All that’s needed is for the cue (now tied to a number—something you already know) to connect to the items you want to remember.

Of course, most of the time, you don’t need to link a concept to a number. Instead, you probably just want to connect a vocabulary word in your target language to a word or concept in your native language. Using vivid imagery to associate two words is known as the keyword mnemonic. Here’s an example of how it works. The German word for door is Tür. To remember this word, a student who is knowledgeable about the self-reference effect might draw upon an episode in her life as a memory cue. Say she was visiting Istanbul and found herself locked out of her hotel room, made doubly unfortunate by the fact that she had an urgent need to use the room’s facilities. Her despair at being blocked by the unyielding door in Turkey will help her remember the word Tür in German (except for the umlaut—those cost extra).

Chances are, you’ve made use of other mnemonic devices to learn a variety of material. Many children are taught the made-up name Roy G. Biv, which is an acronym for remembering the seven colors of the spectrum in their proper sequence (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet). In a similar way, sentences like My very educated mother just served us nine pies can be an aid in remembering the order of the planets, with the first letter of each word serving as a cue for remembering Mercury, Venus, Earth, and so on (although with the demotion of Pluto, new sentences have been created with only eight words). Need to remember the eight bones of the wrist? Just recall Some lovers try positions that they can’t handle to remember scaphoid, lunate, triquetrum, pisiform, trapezium, trapezoid, capitate, hamate. We think of Spring forward, fall back to remember how to adjust our clocks, and the rhyme Thirty days hath September to figure out whether next week will include April 31 (hint: it probably won’t).

That all sounds great, but can such mental manipulations help you learn a foreign language? The answer is yes and no. Some material does lend itself readily to the use of mnemonic devices, such as in the above examples. Rhymes are easier to remember than prose because words with similar sounds possess an added component to aid in recall, in much the same way that vocal melodies are better remembered than instrumental melodies. Likewise, in the case of the method of loci, the peg system, and the keyword mnemonic, the use of imagery may help jog memory. Interestingly, the method of loci has also been used to treat depression by helping individuals recall positive, self-affirming personal memories.²¹

Unfortunately, mnemonic devices also have some limitations. First of all, the majority of linguistic information to be mastered cannot be adapted easily to these techniques. For example, vivid mental images, no matter how apt or bizarre, will be useful in only a limited number of situations, and may fade quickly unless reinforced through testing. Moreover, words that are associated with a visual image are sometimes confused upon recall (Was the word for door in German Tür or was it Türk?). Finally, creating images and associations takes time that might be better spent on other learning strategies.²²

Therefore, our advice is to try to use mnemonic devices only if they feel natural to you and suit the material. Incorporated along with the other strategies we’ve discussed in this book, mnemonic devices can be looked upon as additional tools in your cognitive tool kit. Mix and match as needed. Keep in mind, however, that learning can’t occur unless you also maintain a healthy physical condition and a positive emotional state. If you want to improve your memory ability, be sure to get enough sleep, keep yourself healthy, stay relaxed, and maintain a positive attitude toward your target language and culture.²³