POLITENESS AND MEMORY FOR THE WORDING OF REMARKS

Three experiments were conducted to examine whether people spontaneous ly remember the wording used to convey politeness. In all experiments, subjects heard statements varying in politeness that had been made by either a high-status (e.g., a professor) or equal-status (e.g., anoth er student) speaker. Subjects' incidental memory for these statements was then tested with either a recognition (Experiments 1 and 3) or a r ecall (Experiment 2) procedure. As expected, there was evidence of sig nificant memory for wording that conveyed politeness, and subjects wer e more likely to remember forms that were incongruous with the speaker 's status. There was also some evidence that subjects encoded the poli teness of a remark even when they were unable to recall the specific r emark. The results demonstrate the role of the interpersonal dimension in the processing of language in context.