Notes

1  Terms and Conditions

1The notes in this book contain references to scientific research that supports the claims we put forward. If you don’t care about sources, feel free to simply ignore the notes.

2On adults learning language more easily than children, see David P. Ausubel, “Adults versus Children in Second-Language Learning: Psychological Considerations,” Modern Language Journal 48 (7) (1964): 420–424; Stefka H. Marinova-Todd, D. Bradford Marshall, and Catherine E. Snow, “Three Misconceptions about Age and L2 Learning,” TESOL Quarterly 34 (1) (2000): 9–34; and Mary Schleppegrell, “The Older Language Learner” (Washington, DC: ERIC Clearinghouse on Languages and Linguistics, 1987), http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED287313.pdf. On children’s ability to acquire a native accent, see Stephen D. Krashen, Michael A. Long, and Robin C. Scarcella, “Age, Rate, and Eventual Attainment in Second Language Acquisition,” TESOL Quarterly 13 (4) (1979): 573–582. On adults’ ability of achieving native-like fluency, see David Birdsong, “Ultimate Attainment in Second Language Acquisition,” Language 68 (4) (1992): 706–755. On children’s having no language learning anxiety, see David P. Ausubel, Educational Psychology: A Cognitive View (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1968); Gregory K. Moffatt, The Parenting Journey: From Conception through the Teen Years (Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood, 2004); Schleppegrell, “The Older Language Learner.”

3On disciplines involved in cognitive science, see Howard Gardner, The Mind’s New Science: A History of the Cognitive Revolution (New York: Basic Books, 1985).

4On top-down processing in reading comprehension, see, e.g., Arthur C. Graesser, Cheryl Bowers, Ute J. Bayen, and Xiangen Hu, “Who Said What? Who Knows What? Tracking Speakers and Knowledge in Narratives,” in New Perspectives on Narrative Perspective, ed. Willie van Peer and Seymour Chatman, 255–272 (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2001).

5On adults’ abilities to capitalize on their extensive world knowledge and experience, see, e.g., John B. Black and Robert Wilensky, “An Evaluation of Story Grammars,” Cognitive Science 3 (3) (1979): 213–230.

6On metacognitive and metamemory abilities not being fully developed until adulthood, see Wolfgang Schneider and Kathrin Lockl, “The Development of Metacognitive Knowledge in Children and Adolescents,” in Applied Metacognition, ed. Timothy J. Perfect and Bennett L. Schwartz, 224–260 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

7On adults’ sophisticated understanding of their cognitive processes, see Ethan Zell and Zlatan Krizan, “Do People Have Insight into Their Abilities? A Metasynthesis,” Perspectives on Psychological Science 9 (2) (2014): 111–125.

8On politeness routines learned in childhood, see Jean Berko Gleason, Rivka Y. Perlmann, and Esther Blank Greif, “What’s the Magic Word: Learning Language through Politeness Routines,” Discourse Processes 7 (4) (1984): 493–502.

2  Set Yourself Up for Success

1On the availability heuristic, see Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, “Availability: A Heuristic for Judging Frequency and Probability,” Cognitive Psychology 5 (2) (1973): 207–232. For the use of heuristics in artificial intelligence, see, e.g., Herbert A. Simon, “The Structure of Ill-Structured Problems,” Artificial Intelligence 4 (1973): 181–201, http://www.public.iastate.edu/~cschan/235/6_Simon_Ill_defined_problem.pdf.

2On how likely people are to buy earthquake insurance as the memory of the earthquake fades, see Riccardo Rebonato, Plight of the Fortune Tellers: Why We Need to Manage Financial Risk Differently (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010).

3On the planning fallacy, see Roger Buehler, Dale Griffin, and Michael Ross, “Exploring the ‘Planning Fallacy:’ Why People Underestimate Their Task Completion Times,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 67 (3) (1994): 366–381; Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, “Intuitive Prediction: Biases and Corrective Procedures,” Technical Report PTR-1042-77-6, 1977, http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?AD=ADA047747.

4On the benefits of process-focused planning, see Shelley E. Taylor, Lien B. Pham, Inna D. Rivkin, and David A. Armor, “Harnessing the Imagination: Mental Simulation, Self-Regulation, and Coping,” American Psychologist 53 (4) (1998): 429–439.

5On counterfactual thinking, see Victoria Husted Medvec, Scott F. Madey, and Thomas Gilovich, “When Less Is More: Counterfactual Thinking and Satisfaction among Olympic Medalists,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 69 (4) (1995): 603–610.

6On the benefits on maintaining positive beliefs about aging, see Becca R. Levy, Alan B. Zonderman, Martin D. Slade, and Luigi Ferrucci, “Age Stereotypes Held Earlier in Life Predict Cardiovascular Events in Later Life,” Psychological Science 20 (3) (2009): 296–298.

7For more on the hindsight bias, see Neal J. Roese and Kathleen D. Vohs, “Hindsight Bias,” Perspectives on Psychological Science 7 (5) (2012): 411–426.

8On the time it takes to form new habits, in addition to Maxwell Maltz, Psycho-Cybernetics: A New Way to Get More Living Out of Life (New York: Prentice Hall, 1960), see, e.g., Phillippa Lally, Cornelia H. M. Van Jaarsveld, Henry W. W. Potts, and Jane Wardle, “How Are Habits Formed: Modeling Habit Formation in the Real World,” European Journal of Social Psychology 40 (6) (2010): 998–1009.

9On predictors of how successful people are at giving up smoking, see Andrew Hyland, Ron Borland, Qiang Li, Hua H. Yong, Ann McNeill, Geoffrey T. Fong, Richard J. O’Connor, and K. M. Cummings, “Individual-Level Predictors of Cessation Behaviours among Participants in the International Tobacco Control (ITC) Four Country Survey,” Tobacco Control 15 (Suppl. III) (2006): iii83–iii94.

10On distributed versus massed practice (or cramming), see John Dunlosky, Katherine A. Rawson, Elizabeth J. Marsh, Mitchell J. Nathan, and Daniel T. Willingham, “Improving Students’ Learning with Effective Learning Techniques: Promising Directions from Cognitive and Educational Psychology,” Psychological Science in the Public Interest 14 (1) (2013): 4–58.

11“Specific, high (hard) goals lead to a higher level of task performance”: Edwin A. Locke and Gary P. Latham, “New Directions in Goal-Setting Theory,” Current Directions in Psychological Science 15 (5) (2006): 265–268, at 265.

12For Bandura’s work on self-efficacy, see Albert Bandura, “Self-Efficacy: Toward a Unifying Theory of Behavioral Change,” Psychological review 84 (2) (1977): 191–215.

13On negative experiences leading to low self-efficacy, see Madeline E. Ehrman, Understanding Second Language Learning Difficulties (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1996).

14For Navratilova’s interviews, see Giles Smith, “Tennis: Wimbledon’93: Navratilova Looking Forward to a Happy 21st: The Woman with More Titles Than Any Other Player Relishes the Unpredictability of Grass, Especially on Centre Court,” Independent, June 21, 1993, http://www.independent.co.uk/sport/tennis-wimbledon-93-navratilova-looking-forward-to-a-happy-21st-the-woman-with-more-titles-than-any-other-player-relishes-the-unpredictability-of-grass-especially-on-centre-court-giles-smith-reports-1492895.html. For more on self-handicapping, see Arthur Frankel and Mel L. Snyder, “Egotism among the Depressed: When Self-Protection Becomes Self-Handicapping,” 1987, paper presented at the annual convention of the American Psychological Association, http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED289120.pdf.

15On self-handicapping becoming a way of life, see, e.g., S. Berglas and E. E. Jones, “Control of Attributions about the Self through Selfhandicapping Strategies: The Appeal of Alcohol and the Role of Underachievement,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 4 (2) (1978): 200–206.

16On lessening anxiety about trying to achieve proficiency later in life, see Zoltán Dörnyei, “Motivation and Motivating in the Foreign Language Classroom,” Modern Language Journal 78 (3) (1994): 273–284, and “Motivation in Second and Foreign Language Learning,” Language Teaching 31 (3) (1998): 117–135.

17On Vygotsky’s concept of zone of proximal development, see Lev S. Vygotsky, Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980).

18On the ability to gauge for yourself whether you’re “in the zone,” see Janet Metcalfe, “Metacognitive Judgments and Control of Study,” Current Directions in Psychological Science 18 (3) (2009): 159–163.

3  Aspects of Language

1On the nature of English spelling–sound relationships and George Bernard Shaw, see Ben Zimmer, “GHOTI,” New York Times Magazine, June 25, 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/27/magazine/27FOB-onlanguage-t.html?_r=0 Zimmer 2010.

2On the advice to focus solely on speaking and listening so as not to be confused by irregularities, see, e.g., Paul Pimsleur, How to Learn a Foreign Language (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013).

3Focusing on spoken material “deprives the older learner of his principal learning tool”: Ausubel, “Adults versus Children in Second-Language Learning,” 423.

4For these statistics and more, see Office of the Inspector General, “Inspection of the Foreign Service Institute,” March 31, 2013, http://oig.state.gov/system/files/209366.pdf.

5On the various definitions of fluency, see Marie-Noèlle Guillot, Fluency and Its Teaching (Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 1999).

6For more on aphasia, see http://www.aphasia.org.

7For Crawford’s story, see Philip Crawford, “Bon Appétit? Not So Fast,” New York Times, May 6, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/07/opinion/bon-appetit-not-so-fast.html.

8For more on interlanguages, see Larry Selinker, “Interlanguage,” International Review of Applied Linguistics 10 (1–4) (1972): 209–231.

9For more on fossilization, see, e.g., Larry Selinker and John T. Lamendella, “The Role of Extrinsic Feedback in Interlanguage Fossilization,” Language Learning 29 (2) (1979): 363–376.

10On the cognitive science notion of common ground, see Herbert H. Clark and C. R. Marshall, “Definite Reference and Mutual Knowledge,” in Elements of Discourse Understanding, ed. Aravind K. Joshi, Bonnie L. Webber, and Ivan A. Sag, 10–63 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).

4  Pragmatics and Culture

1On adults’ ability to learn vocabulary and grammar and how it compares to that of children, see, e.g., Ellen Bialystok and Kenji Hakuta, In Other Words: The Science and Psychology of Second-Language Acquisition (New York: Basic Books, 1994); James Emil Flege, Grace H. Yeni-Komshian, and Serena Liu, “Age Constraints on Second-Language Acquisition,” Journal of Memory and Language 41 (1) (1999): 78–104.

2For more on the ILR Speaking Skill Scale, see http://www.govtilr.org/skills/ILRscale2.htm.

3“Make your conversational contribution such as is required”: H. Paul Grice, “Logic and Conversation,” in Syntax and Semantics, vol. 3: Speech Acts, ed. Peter Cole and Jerry. L. Morgan, 41–58, at 45 (New York: Academic Press, 1975). For more on Grice’s Cooperative Principle and his conversational maxims, see also Grice, “Further Notes on Logic and Conversation,” in Syntax and Semantics, vol. 9: Pragmatics, ed. Peter Cole, 183–197 (New York: Academic Press, 1978).

4For examples of when we might no longer assume a conversational partner is cooperating, see Richard Roberts and Roger Kreuz, “Nonstandard Discourse and Its Coherence,” Discourse Processes 16 (4) (1993): 451–464.

5For more on Austin’s speech act theory, see John L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, 2nd ed. ed. J. O. Urmson and Marina Sbisá (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975).

6On figurative speech as fundamental to language, see Howard R. Pollio, Jack M. Barlow, Harold J. Fine, and Marilyn R. Pollio, Psychology and the Poetics of Growth: Figurative Language in Psychology, Psychotherapy, and Education (Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1977).

7On ambiguous figurative language not being rare, again see Pollio et al., Psychology and the Poetics of Growth. On the shared root of the English to be and the Sanskrit to breathe, see Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976).

8For estimates on how many different figures of speech there are, see, e.g., Alex Preminger, and T. V. F. Brogan, eds., The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (New York: MJF Books, 1993). On Americans as greatly prone to exaggeration, see, e.g., “American Exaggerations,” New York Times, August 4, 1854, p. 4, http://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1854/08/04/88135952.html. For Queen Elizabeth II’s famously understated remark, see Caroline Davies, “How the Royal Family Bounced Back from Its ‘Annus Horribilis,’” Guardian, May 24, 2012, http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2012/may/24/royal-family-bounced-back-annus-horribilis.

9On how metaphors become less malleable over time, see Anne Cutler, “Idioms: The Colder the Older,” Linguistic Inquiry 13 (1982): 317–320. On the novelty of an idiomatic expression upon one’s first encounter with it, see Jeannette Littlemore, “Metaphoric Intelligence and Foreign Language Learning,” Humanising Language Teaching 3 (2) (2001), http://www.hltmag.co.uk/mar01/mart1.htm.

10On metaphoric intelligence, see Littlemore, “Metaphoric Intelligence and Foreign Language Learning.”

11On using language to maintain interpersonal relationships, see Gabriele Kasper, Can Pragmatic Competence Be Taught? (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i, Second Language Teaching & Curriculum Center, 1997), http://www.nflrc.hawaii.edu/NetWorks/NW06/.

12On the difficulty of translating interpersonal abilities between cultures, see, e.g., Raymond Carroll, Cultural Misunderstandings: The French-American Experience (University of Chicago Press, 1988). On highcontext versus low-context cultures, see Edward T. Hall, Beyond Culture (New York: Anchor Books, 1976).

13On Japan, China, and Korea as high-context cultures, see, e.g., Elizabeth Würtz, “Intercultural Communication on Websites: A Cross-Cultural Analysis of Websites from High-Context Cultures and Low-Context Cultures,” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 11 (1) (2006): 274–299. On leaving things unsaid in high-context cultures, see again Hall, Beyond Culture.

14On Germany, Norway, and the United States as low-context cultures, see again Würtz, “Intercultural Communication on Websites.” On schizophrenics and their partners’ common ground, see Roberts and Kreuz, “Nonstandard Discourse and Its Coherence.”

15On people in Turkey as more extroverted than people in Japan, see C. Ashley Fulmer, Michele J. Gelfand, Arie W. Kruglanski, Chu Kim-Prieto, Ed Diener, Antonio Pierro, and E. Tory Higgins, “On “Feeling Right” in Cultural Contexts: How Person-Culture Match Affects Self- Esteem and Subjective Well-Being,” Psychological Science 21 (11) (2010): 1563–1569.

16On taking into account your own unique relationship to the language and culture you want to learn, see Kasper, Can Pragmatic Competence Be Taught?

17On the uncanny valley, see M. Mori, “The Uncanny Valley,” IEEE Robotics and Automation Magazine 19 (2) (1970): 98–100.

5  Language and Perception

1On Salthouse’s general slowing hypothesis, see Timothy A. Salthouse, “The Processing-Speed Theory of Adult Age Differences in Cognition,” Psychological Review 103 (3) (1996): 403–428.

2On the pauses in conversations between native speakers, see Susan Ervin-Tripp, “Children’s Verbal Turn-Taking,” in Developmental Pragmatics, ed. Elinor Ochs and Bambi Schieffelin, 391–414 (New York: Academic Press, 1979). On the extensive cognitive processing that goes into such pauses, see Willem J. M. Levelt, Speaking: From Intention to Articulation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989).

3On the “filled pause,” see Geoffrey Beattie, “The Dynamics of Interruption and the Filled Pause,” British Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology 16 (3) (1977): 283–284.

4On the efficacy of “train your brain” practices at improving other abilities, see Adrian M. Owen, Adam Hampshire, Jessica A. Grahn, Robert Stenton, Said Dajani, Alistair S. Burns, Robert J. Howard, and Clive G. Ballard, “Putting Brain Training to the Test,” Nature 465 (2010): 775–778.

5For research on bilinguals regarding the cognitive benefits of foreign language learning, see Ellen Bialystok, Fergus I. M. Craik, David W. Green, and Tamar H. Gollan, “Bilingual Minds,” Psychological Science in the Public Interest 10 (3) (2009): 89–129.

6For estimates on the relative numbers of monolinguals, bilinguals, and multilinguals, see G. Richard Tucker, “A Global Perspective on Bilingualism and Bilingual Education,” Center for Applied Linguistics, 1999, http://www.cal.org/resource-center/briefs-digests/digests.

7For research on the cognitive abilities of those who can speak more than one language, see Bialystok et al., “Bilingual Minds.” For research on the performance of bilinguals on tests of selective attention and multitasking, see Ellen Bialystok and Fergus I. M. Craik, “Cognitive and Linguistic Processing in the Bilingual Mind,” Current Directions in Psychological Science 19 (1) (2010): 19–23. On bilinguals’ performance on the Stroop Test, see Ellen Bialystok, “Reshaping the Mind: The Benefits of Bilingualism,” Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology 65 (4)(2011): 229–235.

8For the explanation of bilinguals being better at multitasking in terms of inhibiting one language, see Ellen Bialystok, Fergus I. M. Craik, and Gigi Luk, “Bilingualism: Consequences for Mind and Brain,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 16 (4) (2012): 240–250. For bilinguals’ superior performance on concept formation tasks, following complex instructions, and switching to new instructions, see Ellen Bialystok and Michelle M. Martin, “Attention and Inhibition in Bilingual Children: Evidence from the Dimensional Change Card Sort Task,” Developmental Science 7 (3) (2004): 325–339; Elizabeth Peal and Wallace C. Lambert, “The Relations of Bilingualism to Intelligence,” Psychological Monographs: General and Applied 76 (27) (1962): 1–23. On the cognitive and linguistic advantages of bilingualism outweighing negative aspects, see Bialystok and Craik, “Cognitive and Linguistic Processing in the Bilingual Mind.”

9For the details of the research into the incidence of Alzheimer’s in bilinguals compared to monolinguals, see Ellen Bialystok, Fergus I. M. Craik, and Morris Freedman, “Bilingualism as a Protection against the Onset of Symptoms of Dementia,” Neuropsychologia 45 (2) (2007): 459–464.

10For the details of the study in India on the incidence of Alzheimer’s in bilinguals, see Suvarna Alladi, Thomas H. Bak, Vasanta Duggirala, Bapiraju Surampudi, Mekala Shailaja, Anuj Kumar Shukla, Jaydip Ray Chaudhuri, and Subhash Kaul, “Bilingualism Delays Age at Onset of Dementia, Independent of Education and Immigration Status,” Neurology 81 (22) (2013): 1938–1944. For the positive effects of bilingualism even when the person acquired the language in adulthood, see Thomas H. Bak, Jack J. Nissan, Michael M. Allerhand, and Ian J. Deary, “Does Bilingualism Influence Cognitive Aging?” Annals of Neurology 75 (6) (2014): 959–963. For the suggestion that the positive benefits of bilingualism only accrue to those who use both languages all the time, see Claudia Dreifus, “The Bilingual Advantage,” New York Times, May 30, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/31/science/31conversation.html.

11On the claim that further research is needed to determine what caused the differences in age of onset between monolinguals and bilinguals, see Judith F. Kroll, “The Consequences of Bilingualism for the Mind and the Brain,” Psychological Science in the Public Interest 10 (3) (2009): i–ii.

12On the issue of whether being socially active prevents dementia, or whether people who don’t have dementia are more likely to be socially active, see Hui-Xin Wang, Anita Karp, Bengt Winblad, and Laura Fratiglioni, “Late-Life Engagement in Social and Leisure Activities Is Associated with a Decreased Risk of Dementia: A Longitudinal Study from the Kungsholmen Project,” American Journal of Epidemiology 155 (12) (2002): 1081–1087.

13On the spontaneous rate of speech in English and Japanese, see Harry Osser and Frederick Peng, “A Cross Cultural Study of Speech Rate,” Language and Speech 7 (2) (1964): 120–125.

14For research on the phenomenon of generalization and transfer, see, e.g., Ann R. Bradlow and Tessa Bent, “Perceptual Adaptation to Non-Native Speech,” Cognition 106 (2) (2008): 707–729.

15For research into the generalization effect, see Cynthia G. Clopper and David B. Pisoni, “Some Acoustic Cues for the Perceptual Categorization of American English Regional Dialects,” Journal of Phonetics 32 (1) (2004): 111–140.

16For the details of Flege and his colleagues’ study on age constraints on second-language learning, see James Emil Flege, Grace H. Yeni-Komshian, and Serena Liu, “Age Constraints on Second-Language Acquisition,” Journal of Memory and Language 41 (1) (1999): 78–104.

17For details on the research on Italians who immigrated to the United States, see Ian R. A. Mackay, James E. Flege, and Satomi Imai, “Evaluating the Effects of Chronological Age and Sentence Duration on Degree of Perceived Foreign Accent,” Applied Psycholinguistics 27 (2) (2006): 157–183.

18For the quote from Meryl Streep, see Benjamin Wood, “The Iron Lady: Meryl Streep Says Accents Are the Easiest Thing She Does,” Entertainment Weekly, December 7, 2011, http://insidemovies.ew.com/2011/12/07/meryl-streep-iron-lady-panel/.

6  Cognition from Top to Bottom

1On the McGurk effect, see Harry McGurk and John MacDonald, “Hearing Lips and Seeing Voices,” Nature 264 (1976): 746–748.

2For Lin’s Unspeakableness project, see http://uniquelang.peiyinglin.net.

3On the question of the extent to which language influences thought, see, e.g., Benjamin Lee Whorf and Stuart Chase, Language, Thought, and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf, ed. John B. Carroll (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1956). On treating concepts from the native language as prototypes for concepts in the new language, see Gilbert A. Jarvis, “Psychological Processes in Foreign and Second Language Learning,” in Critical Issues in Foreign Language Instruction, ed. Ellen S. Silber, 29–42, Garland Reference Library of Social Science, Volume 459 (New York: Routledge, 1991).

4On the topic of how thinking in a native or a foreign language influences problem solving, see Boaz Keysar, Sayuri L. Hayakawa, and Sun Gyu An, “The Foreign-Language Effect: Thinking in a Foreign Tongue Reduces Decision Biases,” Psychological Science 23 (6) (2012): 661–668. On speaking a nonnative language giving the speaker distance from a moral problem, see Boaz Keysar and Albert Costa, “Our Moral Tongue,” New York Times, June 20, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/22/opinion/sunday/moral-judgments-depend-on-what-language-we-are-speaking.html. On using one’s native language versus a nonnative language to remember autobiographical events and its effect on the arousal of emotion, see Viorica Marian and Margarita Kaushanskaya, “Self-Construal and Emotion in Bicultural Bilinguals,” Journal of Memory and Language 51 (2) (2004): 190–201.

5For the estimate that a native college-educated speaker of English knows only about 17,000 words, see Eugene B. Zechmeister, Andrea M. Chronis, William L. Cull, Catherine A. D’Anna, and Noreen A. Healy, “Growth of a Functionally Important Lexicon,” Journal of Literacy Research 27 (2) (1995): 201–212.

6On the use of idiolect to determine the identity of the Unabomber, see James R. Fitzgerald, “Using a Forensic Linguistic Approach to Track the Unabomber,” in Profilers: Leading Investigators Take You Inside the Criminal Mind, ed. John H. Campbell, 193–222 (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2010); on its use to identify the authors of the Federalist Papers, see Frederick Mosteller and David L. Wallace, “Inference in an Authorship Problem: A Comparative Study of Discrimination Methods Applied to the Authorship of the Disputed Federalist Papers,” Journal of the American Statistical Association 58, (302) (1963): 275–309; and on its use to identify the author of Primary Colors, see Donald W. Foster, Author Unknown: On the Trail of Anonymous (New York: Henry Holt, 2000).

7For Ogden’s proposal of Basic English, see Charles Kay Ogden, Basic English: A General Introduction with Rules and Grammar (London: Paul Treber, 1944).

8On using the word order from your native language in your target language as an instance of negative transfer, see David N. Perkins and Gavriel Salomon, “Transfer of Learning,” in The International Encyclopedia of Education, 2nd ed., vol. 11, ed. Torsten Husen and T. Neville Postlethwaite, 6452–6457 (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1992).

9On high-road and low-road transfer as the two mechanisms adult language learners can use to facilitate positive transfer, see Gavriel Salomon and David N. Perkins, “Rocky Roads to Transfer: Rethinking Mechanisms of a Neglected Phenomenon,” Educational Psychologist 24 (2) (1989): 113–142. On the example of driving a rental truck after driving a car as one of low-road transfer, see Perkins and Salomon, “Transfer of Learning.”

10For these examples of metaphors, see George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 44–45.

11For research on expressions of heartbreak, see Kathrin Abe, Nadja Kesper, and Matthias Warich, “Domain Mappings—General Results,” in Cross-Cultural Metaphors: Investigating Domain Mappings across Cultures, ed. Marcus Callies and Rüdiger Zimmerman, 29–40 (Marburg: Philipps-Universität, 2002).

12For his work on idioms, see Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr., The Poetics of Mind: Figurative Thought, Language, and Understanding (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); these examples come from p. 9.

13On thinking about the conceptual mappings of metaphors and idioms in your target language as an aid to organization and learning, see, e.g., Andrew Ortony, “Why Metaphors Are Necessary and Not Just Nice,” Educational Theory 25 (1) (1975): 45–53; Hugh G. Petrie and Rebecca S. Oshlag, “Metaphor and Learning,” in Metaphor and Thought, 2nd ed., ed. Andrew Ortony, 579–609 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

7  Making Memories …

1For Miller’s “the magical number seven, plus or minus two,” see George A. Miller, “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on our Capacity for Processing Information,” Psychological Review 63 (2) (1956): 81–97.

2On the steady decline of memory span after the age of twenty, see Jacques Grégoire and Martial Van der Linden, “Effect of Age on Forward and Backward Digit Spans,” Aging, Neuropsychology, and Cognition 4 (2) (1997): 140–149.

3“The adult learns best not by rote …”: Schleppegrell, “The Older Language Learner,” 3.

4For research on the exact size of working memory, see Nelson Cowan, Working Memory Capacity (New York: Taylor & Francis, 2004); Jonathan E. Thiele, Michael S. Pratte, and Jeffrey N. Rouder, “On Perfect Working-Memory Performance with Large Numbers of Items,” Psychonomic Bulletin and Review 18 (5) (2011): 958–963.

5For Alan Baddeley’s research on working memory, see Alan D. Baddeley and Graham Hitch, “Working Memory,” Psychology of Learning and Motivation 8 (1974): 47–89.

6For research on the decline in middle age of the central executive’s ability to deal with competing information, see Elizabeth L. Glisky, “Changes in Cognitive Function in Human Aging,” in Brain Aging: Models, Methods, and Mechanisms, ed. David R. Riddle, 3–20 (Boca Raton, FL: Taylor & Francis, 2007); Lynn Hasher, Rose T. Zacks, and Cynthia P. May, “Inhibitory Control, Circadian Arousal, and Age,” in Attention and Performance XVII: Cognitive Regulation of Performance: Interaction of Theory and Application, ed. Daniel Gopher and Asher Koriat, 653–675 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999).

7On the claim that the efficacy of the central executive reaches its peak during one’s twenties, see Cinzia R. De Luca and Richard J. Leventer, “Developmental Trajectories of Executive Functions Across the Lifespan,” in Executive Functions and the Frontal Lobes: A Lifespan Perspective, vol. 3, ed. Vicki Anderson, Rani Jacobs, and Peter J. Anderson, 23–56 (New York: Psychology Press, 2008). For the claim that it does not peak as much as previously thought, see Paul Verhaeghen, “Aging and Executive Control: Reports of a Demise Greatly Exaggerated,” Current Directions in Psychological Science 20 (3) (2011): 174–180.

8For the claim that our ability to multitask is not as great as we think and declines over time, see Hironori Ohsugi et al., “Differences in Dual-Task Performance and Prefrontal Cortex Activation between Younger and Older Adults,”BMC Neuroscience 14 (10) (2013), http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2202/14/10; Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons, The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us (New York: Crown, 2010).

9For more on depth of processing and Craik and Tulving’s classic experiment, see Fergus I. M. Craik and Robert S. Lockhart, “Levels of Processing: A Framework for Memory Research,” Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 11 (6) (1972): 671–684; Fergus I. M. Craik and Endel Tulving, “Depth of Processing and the Retention of Words in Episodic Memory,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 104 (3) (1975): 268–294.

10For a critical view of the depth of processing approach, see, e.g., Alan D. Baddeley, “The Trouble with Levels: A Reexamination of Craik and Lockhart’s Framework for Memory Research,” Psychological review 85 (3) (1978): 139–152.

11“The most important single factor influencing learning”: David P. Ausubel, Educational Psychology: A Cognitive View (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1968), vi.

12For Ebbinghaus’s proposal of a third way of measuring memory, see Hermann Ebbinghaus, Memory: A Contribution to Experimental Psychology (1885; New York: Dover, 1964).

13For Squire and Slater’s study of the ability to recognize names of TV programs and racehorses, see Larry R. Squire and Pamela C. Slater, “Forgetting in Very Long-Term Memory as Assessed by an Improved Questionnaire Technique,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Learning and Memory 1 (1) (1975): 50–54.

14For the claim that recognition memory can be excellent many decades after learning, see Harry P. Bahrick, “Semantic Memory Content in Permastore: Fifty Years of Memory for Spanish Learned in School,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 113 (1) (1984): 1–29.

15On the kanji for fortune telling, see James W. Heisig, Remembering the Kanji: A Complete Course on How Not to Forget the Meaning and Writing of Japanese Characters (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2011), 32.

16For the Yerkes–Dodson law, see Robert M. Yerkes and John D. Dodson, “The Relation of Strength of Stimulus to Rapidity of Habit-Formation,” Journal of Comparative Neurology and Psychology 18 (1908): 459–482.

17For the claim that how someone responds to additional cognitive demands placed on a task depends on the task itself, the cognitive strategy used, and the level of mastery, see Janina A. Hoffmann, Bettina von Helversen, and Jörg Rieskamp, “Deliberation’s Blindsight: How Cognitive Load Can Improve Judgments,” Psychological Science 24 (6) (2013): 869–879.

18For the claim that even routine tasks can require extra mental processing, see Jean-François Bonnefon, Aidan Feeney, and Wim De Neys, “The Risk of Polite Misunderstandings,” Current Directions in Psychological Science 20 (5) (2011): 321–324.

19For more on proactive interference, see Robert G. Crowder, Principles of Learning and Memory (Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1976).

20For the details of this study on proactive interference, see Lisa Emery, Sandra Hale, and Joel Myerson, “Age Differences in Proactive Interference, Working Memory, and Abstract Reasoning,” Psychology and Aging 23 (3) (2008): 634–645.

8 … And Making Memories Work for You

1The TOT state is a “mild torment, something like the brink of a sneeze”: Roger Brown and David McNeill, “The ‘Tip of the Tongue’ Phenomenon,” Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 5 (4) (1966): 325–337, at 326.

2For more on TOT states, see Donna J. Dahlgren, “Impact of Knowledge and Age on Tip-of-the-Tongue Rates,” Experimental Aging Research 24 (2) (1998): 139–153; Marilyn K. Heine, Beth A. Ober, and Gregory K. Shenaut, “Naturally Occurring and Experimentally Induced Tip-of-the-Tongue Experiences in Three Adult Age Groups,” Psychology and Aging 14 (3) (1999): 445–457.

3For more on TOT states and aging, see Timothy A. Salthouse and Arielle R. Mandell, “Do Age-Related Increases in Tip-of-the-Tongue Experiences Signify Episodic Memory Impairments?” Psychological Science 24 (12) (2013): 2489–2497.

4For the claim that novice chess players perform poorly on the task of recreating a position, see William G. Chase and Herbert A. Simon, “Perception in Chess,” Cognitive Psychology 4 (1) (1973): 55–81.

5For the claim that the vocabulary of the chess expert is between 50,000 and 100,000 patterns, see Herbert A. Simon and Kevin Gilmartin, “A Simulation of Memory for Chess Positions,” Cognitive Psychology 5 (1) (1973): 29–46. For the estimate of 10,000 hours of practice to acquire the vocabulary in chess and other disciplines, see K. Anders Ericsson, Ralf T. Krampe, and Clemens Tesch-Römer, “The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance,” Psychological Review 100 (3) (1993): 363–406, and Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers: The Story of Success (London: Penguin UK, 2008). For the claim that the effects of practice vary widely by domain, see Brooke N. Macnamara, David Z. Hambrick, and Frederick L. Oswald, “Deliberate Practice and Performance in Music, Games, Sports, Education, and Professions: A Meta-Analysis,” Psychological Science 25 (8) (2014): 1608–1618.

6For Bahrick’s results on recall of classmates’ names, see Harry P. Bahrick, Phyllis O. Bahrick, and Roy P. Wittlinger, “Fifty Years of Memory for Names and Faces: A Cross-Sectional Approach,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 104 (1) (1975): 54–75.

7For Bahrick’s experiment on memory for high school Spanish, see Bahrick, “Semantic Memory Content in Permastore.”

8For more on learning techniques, see John Dunlosky, Katherine A. Rawson, Elizabeth J. Marsh, Mitchell J. Nathan, and Daniel T. Willingham, “Improving Students’ Learning with Effective Learning Techniques: Promising Directions from Cognitive and Educational Psychology,” Psychological Science in the Public Interest 14 (1) (2013): 4–58.

9For the self-reference effect, see Timothy B. Rogers, Nicholas A. Kuiper, and William S. Kirker, “Self-Reference and the Encoding of Personal Information,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 35 (9) (1977): 677–688.

10For the claim that the self-reference effect really is a self-reference effect, see Charles Lord, “Schemas and Images as Memory Aids: Two Modes of Processing Social Information,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 38 (2) (1980): 257–269, and Lord, “Imagining Self and Others: Reply to Brown, Keenan, and Potts,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 53 (3) (1987): 445–450.

11For the claim that the self is “a well-developed and often-used construct,” see Cynthia S. Symons and Blair T. Johnson, “The Self-Reference Effect in Memory: A Meta-Analysis,” Psychological Bulletin 121 (3) (1997): 371–394, at 371. For the claim that people are more likely to remember the birthdays of others if those birthdays fall close to their own, see Selin Kesebir and Shigehiro Oishi, “A Spontaneous Self-Reference Effect in Memory: Why Some Birthdays Are Harder to Remember Than Others,” Psychological Science 21 (10) (2010): 1525–1531.

12For the claim that unpleasant memories weaken over time, see W. Richard Walker, John J. Skowronski, and Charles P. Thompson, “Life is Pleasant—And Memory Helps to Keep It That Way!” Review of General Psychology 7 (2) (2003): 203–210. For the Pollyanna principle, see Margaret Matlin and David Stang, The Pollyanna Principle: Selectivity in Language, Memory, and Thought (Cambridge, MA: Schenkman, 1978).

13For more on encoding specificity, see Endel Tulving and Donald M. Thomson, “Encoding Specificity and Retrieval Processes in Episodic Memory,” Psychological Review 80 (5) (1973): 352–373.

14For a study that measures encoding specificity by manipulating external features, see Duncan R. Godden and Alan D. Baddeley, “Context-Dependent Memory in Two Natural Environments: On Land and Underwater,” British Journal of Psychology 66 (3) (1975): 325–331. For the claim that one’s affective state is also susceptible to encoding specificity, see John D. Teasdale and Sarah J. Fogarty, “Differential Effects of Induced Mood on Retrieval of Pleasant and Unpleasant Events from Episodic Memory,” Journal of Abnormal Psychology 88 (3) (1979): 248–257. For the claim that people do better recalling words after drinking if they’ve learned the words while drinking, see Herbert Weingartner, Wolansa Adefris, James E. Eich, and Dennis L. Murphy, “Encoding-Imagery Specificity in Alcohol State-Dependent Learning,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Learning and Memory 2 (1) (1976): 83–87. For veterans of the Gulf War exhibiting more negative PTSD symptoms near the anniversary of the traumatic event, see Charles A. Morgan, Susan Hill, Patrick Fox, Peter Kingham, and Steven M. Southwick, “Anniversary Reactions in Gulf War Veterans: A Follow-up Inquiry 6 Years After the War,” American Journal of Psychiatry 156 (7) (1999): 1075–1079.

15For the claim that memory improves if the mood when the material was learned matches the mood when the material was recalled, see Paul H. Blaney, “Affect and Memory: A Review,” Psychological Bulletin 99 (2) (1986): 229–246.

16For the claim that stepping back from a task can lead to better problem solving and creativity, see, e.g., Steven M. Smith, Thomas B. Ward, and Ronald A. Finke, eds., The Creative Cognition Approach (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995). For evidence that sleep and dreaming promote incubation effects, see, e.g., Deirdre Barrett, “‘The Committee of Sleep’: A Study of Dream Incubation for Problem Solving,” Dreaming 3 (2) (1993): 115–122.

17For more on scripts or schemata and semantic memory, see Roger C. Schank and Robert P. Abelson, Scripts, Plans, Goals, and Understanding: An Inquiry into Human Knowledge Structures (Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1977).

18For Bartlett’s research on semantic memory, see Frederic C. Bartlett, Remembering: A Study in Experimental and Social Psychology (1932; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1995).

19For more on Cicero’s story of Simonides of Ceos, see E. W. Sutton and H. Rackham, Cicero: On the Orator, Books I–II (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1942).

20For more on mnemonic devices, see Douglas J. Herrmann, Michael M. Gruneberg, and Douglas Raybeck, Improving Memory and Study Skills: Advances in Theory and Practice (Toronto: Hogrefe & Huber, 2002).

21For the claim that rhymes are easier to remember than prose, see Michael W. Weiss, Sandra E. Trehub, and E. Glenn Schellenberg, “Something in the Way She Sings: Enhanced Memory for Vocal Melodies,” Psychological Science 23 (10) (2012): 1074–1078. On the method of loci being used to treat depression, see Tim Dalgleish, Lauren Navrady, Elinor Bird, Emma Hill, Barnaby D. Dunn, and Ann-Marie Golden, “Method-of-Loci as a Mnemonic Device to Facilitate Access to Self-Affirming Personal Memories for Individuals with Depression,” Clinical Psychological Science 1 (2) (2013): 156–162.

22For the claim that vivid mental images will only be useful in limited situations, see Russell N. Carney and Joel R. Levin, “Do Mnemonic Memories Fade as Time Goes By? Here’s Looking Anew!” Contemporary Educational Psychology 23 (3) (1998): 276–297; Margaret H. Thomas and Alvin Y. Wang, “Learning by the Keyword Mnemonic: Looking for Long-Term Benefits,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied 2 (4) (1996): 330–342. For the idea that creating images and associations takes time away from other learning strategies, see Dunlosky et al., “Improving Students’ Learning; Herrmann et al., Improving Memory and Study Skills.

23On the importance of staying healthy for improving your memory, see Herrmann et al., Improving Memory and Study Skills.