Do you remember? Effects of lexical predictability on false and true recognition memory

Prediction, that is, the anticipation of linguistic features during sentence reading, affects language processing in the moment-but does it also affect the memory representations that people store? Here, we aimed to adjudicate between conflicting theoretical accounts that offer divergent predictions about how prediction affects the formation of both false and true (i.e., veridical) memory. Whereas false memory for predictable words can result from prediction during sentence encoding or semantic association during memory retrieval (i.e., prediction vs. retrieval-based activation accounts of false memory), true memory is sometimes improved from congruency with schema or novelty (i.e., schema-congruency vs. prediction-error accounts of true memory). Experiment 1 manipulated the plausibility of prediction-disconfirming words during encoding to investigate whether larger prediction errors suppress false and improve true memory. Experiment 2 investigated false memory for unpredictable semantically related or form-related words to substantiate whether false remembering results from prediction. Experiment 3 investigated how false and true memory are affected by encoding conditions that render a word predictable from or merely congruent with the linguistic context. Our results show that false memory is mediated by prediction and retrieval-based activation-even though a much more sizable contribution comes from retrieval-based activation, not prediction. Similarly, for true memory, results show that both congruency with schema and magnitude of prediction error boost memory formation. We conclude that both true and false memory are driven by multiple cognitive processes, and we explore avenues toward a unified framework for understanding memory. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).