Conversation, speech acts, and memory

Speakers frequently have specific intentions that they want others to recognize (Grice, 1957). These specific intentions can be viewed as speech acts (Searle, 1969), and I argue that they play a role in long-term memory for conversation utterances. Five experiments were conducted to examine this idea. Participants in all experiments read scenarios ending with either a target utterance that performed a specific speech act (brag, beg, etc.) or a carefully matched control. Participants were more likely to falsely recall and recognize speech act verbs after having read the speech act version than after having read the control version, and the speech act verbs served as better recall cues for the speech act utterances than for the controls. Experiment 5 documented individual differences in the encoding of speech act verbs. The results suggest that people recognize and retain the actions that people perform with their utterances and that this is one of the organizing principles of conversation memory.