Do people use memories of pause and intonation to assess the credibility of information remembered from speech

Conversation is an important source of information. However, information acquired in conversation is often not credible. People often provide erroneous information. Therefore, monitoring the credibility of information is a critical element of processing information originating in conversation. There is evidence indicating that listeners of conversations can evaluate the credibility of information from surface features of the speech (Brennan & Williams, 1995) because surface features such as pauses and intonation reveal the speaker's knowledge and confidence about an answer (Smith & Clark, 1993). A long pause or rising intonation marks a speaker's production difficulty and/or lack of confidence, thus signaling it may not be credible. Building on these findings, this research extends the investigation to the domain of memory. Specifically three questions were examined: (1) whether people continue to use pause length and intonation to assess the credibility of remembered information; (2) how listeners' listening strategies influence their subsequent memory of the credibility as well as of the content of the speech; and (3) what types of information they remember when they remember the credibility. The results indicated: (1) people continue to use intonation to assess the credibility of remembered information; (2) the degrees to which people use intonation to assess credibility of remembered information is partly dependent on how they listen to other people's speech; (3) people generally do not remember pause length; (4) the ways in which people listen to other people's speech influence their memory of the speech. Implications of these findings will be discussed with respect to in what way people remember intonation when they assess credibility of information remembered from speech.