How can superficial cues like font size or volume fool your judgments of learning?

You'll rate a word as more memorable just because it was shown in a bigger font or spoken louder — a perceptual cue that has nothing to do with actual recall.

In JOL studies, words presented in large fonts or at higher volume get judged as more likely to be remembered than the same words shown small or quiet. The perceptual "loudness" registers as fluency, and fluency masquerades as future memorability.

At test, that surface prominence buys you nothing — recall is essentially unchanged. The lesson: your monitoring system is easily hijacked by irrelevant ease-of-processing signals, so it can't be trusted on feel alone.