Relations as an organising factor in memory

The study examines whether semantic relations play a critical role in the memory organisation of verbal inputs. Across four experiments in two languages (Chinese and English), we constructed phrases involving spatial (e.g. “a fox on a stump”, Experiments 1-2) and possessive relations (e.g. “fox’s bag”, Experiments 3-4) between two nouns, compared to word-pairs lacking such relations (e.g. “a fox, a stump”, Experiment 1-2; “fox, bag”, Experiment 3-4). Participants listened to sequences of either phrases or word-pairs and performed a written free recall task immediately or after delay. Results consistently showed that participants were significantly more likely to recall both nouns from the same phrase adjacently in the phrase condition than in the wordpair condition. Our findings provide robust evidence that semantic relations combining individual concepts into larger memory units, highlighting the critical role of relations in organising verbal information into a memory-amenable format.