Is this a Question? Not for Long. The Statement Bias

Four experiments demonstrate a 'statement bias': questions are more often misremembered as statements than vice versa. Experiment 1 suggests that the bias increases with increasing item comprehensibility. This finding rules out that the statement bias is only due to the belief that statements are more prevalent in communication than questions are. Experiment 2 demonstrates that the statement bias is related to depth of processing at encoding. Experiment 3 shows that the bias occurs irrespective of the truth of the statement underlying the sentence. Experiment 4 shows that the statement bias is also obtained for sentences pertaining to products and services