Feeling of knowing for translations of words

We looked at memory and metamemory for translations of words. Native Turkish speakers with different levels of proficiency in English tried to recall translations in response to both English and Turkish cue words. If they could not, they gave feeling-of-knowing (FOK) ratings. The: accuracy of these ratings was gauged by recognition (Experiment 1) or cued recall (Experiment 2). Both initial recall and magnitudes of FOK ratings were influenced by proficiency levels, although accuracy of these FOK ratings was not. In addition, whereas recall was higher when the cue words were in the participants' weaker language, both the magnitudes of FOK ratings and accuracy were higher when the cue words were in the participants' stronger language. The inaccuracies were largely due to underconfidence by more proficient participants when they gave low FOK ratings and overconfidence by less proficient participants when they gave high FOK ratings. (C) 2000 Academic Press.