Abstract
When monitoring the origins of their memories, people tend to mistakenly attribute mem-
ories generated from internal processes (e.g., imagination, visualization) to perception.
Here, we ask whether speaking a language that obligatorily encodes the source of informa-
tion might help prevent such errors. We compare speakers of English to speakers of
Turkish, a language that obligatorily encodes information source (direct/perceptual vs.
indirect/hearsay or inference) for past events. In our experiments, participants reported
having seen events that they had only inferred from post-event visual evidence. In general,
error rates were higher when visual evidence that gave rise to inferences was relatively
close to direct visual evidence. Furthermore, errors persisted even when participants were
asked to report the specific sources of their memories. Crucially, these error patterns were
equivalent across language groups, suggesting that speaking a language that obligatorily
encodes source of information does not increase sensitivity to the distinction between per-
ception and inference in event memory.
