A study tested the ability of 40 students at Ohio University, 20 Americans and 20 Chinese, to recall parts of nine news headlines flashed at them on pieces of paper. Students in communication subjects or linguistics were excluded as being too knowledgeable in communication theories. The hypothesis for the study stated that native Chinese speakers (character-based language users) have stronger recall of the overall meaning in headlines, compared to native English speakers (phonetic-based language users), who have stronger recall of names and proper nouns but not of the headline's overall meaning. Quantitatively, this hypothesis was not supported. However, in looking specifically at the number of headlines remembered and what was recalled, the hypothesis was supported. Furthermore, in general, women test subjects were more likely to give brief one-to-four-word recall responses, while men were more likely to remember longer passages. Overall, Chinese students tested had much stronger memories than American students tested. This experimental project is very relevant to international mass communication as more and more publications opt to publish several different language versions of the same edition. This not only requires keen translation, but also an understanding that the language a person speaks determines how that person perceives the world. Contains 37 references. (TB)