Two experiments with adult native users of Turkish and English speaking controls examined cognitive repercussions of obligatory grammatical marking in Turkish of directly vs. indirectly experienced events. Exp. 1 examined recall accuracy of Turkish sentences containing direct vs. indirect past tense suffix markers; equivalent sentences in English contained lexical marking of indirectness (e.g., "reportedly"). Exp. 2 examined incidental recognition memory for sentences containing direct vs. indirect experience markers. Performance in Exp. 1 was uniformly low, indicating a floor effect in sentence information recall. Exp. 2 showed significantly better recognition memory for sentences containing the direct marker vs. the indirect marker in Turkish; no such advantage was observed in English. The findings suggest that obligatory marking of directly experienced events has a privileged status in mental representation.