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I'm asking this here as I'm not seeing a psycho-linguistic group, and I think that is what I'm looking at.
I'm hoping there is some degree of crossover.

Is there a specific word or phrase used that means how memorable a word/phrase is? Are there any resources that list words and phrases with such scores, or a way I could (even roughly) calculate a measure for memorability?

At present, the best I can come up with is Frequency. A key component of memory is exposure. Frequency of usage could, with a little shaving and dressing, be used to represent possible exposure. I can find resources for frequency of words and phrases.
I could adjust this by length, or even cobble a kind of complexity measure based on syllables.

Any thoughts ?

alexander gill
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  • Anemone has more mnemonicity than amnesty does. – Greg Lee Jan 31 '15 at 21:22
  • That's good to know. Thank you. What about the other 300K+ english words? :D Is it safe to assume that no one here knows of any memorability metrics or a way to estimate such ? – alexander gill Feb 07 '15 at 14:06
  • There is a proposal in SPE (The Sound Pattern of English) about how the pronunciations of morphemes are stored in memory -- it's the markedness theory of chapter 9. It's never been interpreted as an actual psychological hypothesis, so far as I know, it's awfully complicated, and nobody believes it, so far as I know. Best I can do. – Greg Lee Feb 07 '15 at 15:43
  • Well, a PsyLing has various features, including imageability. It seems the more likely a word is to be imagined, the better the recall. It seems to have a strong correlation with Frequency/exposure too. But I was hoping there was a way to calculate likely memorability based on "something". Looks like I'll just have to fudge it with Frequency as a rough representation :( At least I can use that for bi/tri/quad-grams etc. – alexander gill Feb 07 '15 at 17:25
  • @alexandergill Did you ever figure this out? – asdf3.14159 Oct 29 '22 at 06:48

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