Abstract: False memory is a type of memory illusion where one claims to remember things that never happened. The Deese-Roediger-McDermott, or DRM, paradigm has been extensively adopted to investigate the factors influencing false memory. Using English words, previous studies have found phonological as well as semantic false memories. To investigate whether there is any effect of Chinese phonological association on false memory, two experiments were conducted in the present study.
In experiment 1, subjects first studied several lists of Chinese characters with same syllables, and then took a recognition test. There were three types of characters in the test: studied items, lures (which had same syllables with studied items), and intruding items (which had no relationship with studied items). Subjects’ task was to judge whether each testing item was “old” or not. Results showed that the proportion of lures labeled as “old” was significantly higher than that of intruding items.
In experiment 2, lists of Chinese characters with only same onsets or same rhymes were presented in the study phase. Accordingly, the lures in the test phase shared same onsets or same rhymes with the studied items. Compared with intruding items, more proportion of lures labeled as “old” was found again. Moreover, the proportions of lures labeled as “old” did not have significant differences either between the same-onset and same-rhyme conditions, or between the two experiments.
These results demonstrate that Chinese phonological association does have an effect on false memory, and this effect remains unchanged even when the phonological similarity increases. The present study suggests that false memory can result from low level perceptual-based processing, and that Chinese phonological network can be activated easily, but only to a limited extent.

Key words: false memory, DRM paradigm, phonological association, Chinese character