Research On False Memory In Upper Primary School Children's Vocabulary Acquisition

In real life, people frequently recall something mistakenly. It is common that people often believe they have seen something, which has acctually never been shown to them. The phenomenon that people wrongly declare that a word has been presented or something has happened but never been presented or occurred in the memory is what we call false memory.Based on the analysis of previous studies about false memory, we selected upper primary students (9-11or12years old)as participants to examine the effect of related factors on false memory, hoping to figure out the happening process of false memory and its internal mechanism.The nuclear part of the research is composed of three experiments, in which three factors affecting true or false memory are examined. They are the presentation way of learning materials, the gist-cues of learning materials and students'ability to process these materials. Based on the above three experiments, the major findings are as follows:(1) Both true and false memory increased with age.(2)The presention way of learning materials influenced both true and false memory, especially when the lists are presented simutaneously, it evoked the increase in both true memory and false memory.(3)Providing students with gist-cues obviously improved their true memory while the similar effect had not been detected in their false memory.(4) Processing level played an important role in false memory. The association-processing of the word list can obviously increase the chances of true memory. It also increased the chances of false memory.