Linguist Logic: Why Word-Based Memory Tests Make Me Look Like a Genius

 

I am a linguist. That means I live and breathe words: I analyze them, collect them, play with them, and use them professionally every day. So when I take memory tests that rely heavily on recalling lists of words, I tend to do... oddly well.

Maybe too well.

Case in point: I volunteered for an Alzheimer’s research study recently—just doing my part for science. One of the first tasks? A verbal memory test. I breezed through it. Actually, I aced it. Perfect score. As a 70-year-old, that put me in the same memory tier as a 40-year-old, and the researchers raised their eyebrows. I was declared an “extreme outlier” and—because I had agreed to be part of the study—was promptly invited to donate some of my DNA for further analysis.

I tried to explain: “I get paid to remember words.”
They smiled politely and handed me the blood draw kit anyway.

Now, here's the question that still nags at me: is this kind of test really measuring memory across the board, or is it just measuring one kind of memory—verbal memory—in which linguists are already deeply trained and disproportionately skilled?

Word recall, for me, isn’t just memory. It’s method. I have dozens of internal tricks: semantic clustering, mnemonic anchoring, etymological breakdowns, phonological patterns, narrative scaffolding. I don’t just remember the word—I remember the structure, the connotation, the sound, and its social context. I don’t hear “peach, ladder, horse” and strain to retain them—I build a mental story about a horse climbing a ladder to steal a peach. It’s automatic. It’s not even fair.

But then, here’s the twist: maybe these strategies do make my memory better—not just look better. Maybe training and habit have genuinely strengthened the neural networks involved in memory retention, at least for certain types of input. If we teach memory strategies to others, will their memory improve, too? That’s an open and exciting question in both cognitive science and educational psychology.

Still, if researchers are looking for objective measures of cognitive aging or early cognitive decline, I have to wonder: is a linguist’s performance on word-based memory tests a red herring?

Can you really test my cognition this way? Or are you just testing how many linguistic shortcuts I’ve spent a lifetime refining?

If you want to know how my general memory is doing, maybe test me on something I don’t already manipulate for a living. Spatial memory, visual patterns, non-verbal sequences. Better yet: show me a list of passwords I didn’t make up myself and ask me to recall them under stress.

Otherwise, I'm afraid you'll keep getting distorted data and collecting the blood of outliers who just happen to have advanced degrees in word magic.

But hey—at least I'm doing my part for science. One syllable at a time.

For more posts on memory, click HERE.

For more posts on word recall, click HERE.

For more posts on language learning and linguistics, click HERE.

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