Words that are read aloud are more memorable than words that are read silently. The boundaries of this production effect (MacLeod, Gopie, Hourihan, Neary, & Ozubko, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 36, 671-685, 2010) have been found to extend beyond speech. MacLeod and colleagues demonstrated that mouthing also facilitates memory, leading them to speculate that any distinct, item-specific response should result in a production effect. In Experiment 1, we found support for this conjecture: Relative to silent reading, three unique productions-spelling, writing, and typingall boosted explicit memory. In Experiment 2, we tested the sensitivity of the production effect. Although mouthing, writing, and whispering all improved explicit memory when compared to silent reading, these other production modalities were not as beneficial as speech. We argue that the enhanced distinctiveness of speech relative to other productions-and of other productions relative to silent readingunderlies this pattern of results.

Differences in memory for item order have been used to explain the absence of between-subjects (i.e., pure-list) effects in free recall for several encoding techniques, including the production effect, the finding that reading aloud benefits memory compared with reading silently. Notably, however, evidence in support of the item-order account (Nairne, Riegler, & Serra, 1991) has derived primarily from short-list paradigms. We provide novel evidence that the item-order account also applies when recalling long lists. In Experiment 1, participants studied and then free recalled 3 different long lists of words: pure aloud, pure silent, and mixed (half aloud, half silent). A Bayesian analysis supported a null pure-list production effect, and subsequent order analyses were largely consistent with the item-order account. These findings indicate that order information is retained in long-term memory and is useful in guiding subsequent free recall. In Experiment 2, a distractor task was inserted between the study and test phases, ensuring that only long-term memory processes were involved in recall: The pattern of results remained consistent with the item-order account. Order information can be retained in long-term memory for long lists, and is useful in guiding subsequent free recall, extending the domain of the item-order account. (PsycINFO Database Record

It can be difficult to judge the effectiveness of encoding techniques in a within-subject design. Consider the production effect-the finding that words read aloud are better remembered than words read silently. In the absence of a baseline, a within-subject production effect in a mixed study list could reflect a benefit of reading aloud, a cost of reading silently, or both. To help interpret within-subject data, memory researchers have compared within-subject and between-subjects designs, with the between-subjects (i.e., pure list) conditions serving as baselines against which the within-subject (i.e., mixed-list) conditions are compared. In the present article, the authors highlight a shortcoming of using this comparison to assess costs and benefits in recognition. Unlike between-subjects experiments where separate false alarm rates are obtained for each condition, the typical within-subject experiment yields a collapsed false alarm rate, which, the authors argue, can potentially bias calculations of memory discrimination (d'). Across 3 experiments that used production as the encoding manipulation, they used a typical mixed-list versus pure-list design (Experiment 1) and then made modifications to this design (Experiments 2 and 3) that yielded separate mixed-list false alarm rates. The results of the latter 2 experiments demonstrated that words that are read aloud in a mixed list have an overall memorial benefit over words that are read aloud in a pure list-both in terms of increased hits and reduced false alarms. The authors frame these results in terms of the distinctiveness heuristic. (PsycINFO Database Record

Words that are read aloud are better remembered than those read silently. Recent research has suggested that, rather than reflecting a benefit for produced items, this production effect may reflect a cost to reading silently in a list containing both aloud and silent items (Bodner, Taikh, & Fawcett, 2013). This cost is argued to occur because silent items are lazily read, receiving less attention than aloud items which require an overt response. We examined the possible role of lazy reading in the production effect by testing whether the effect would be reduced under elaborative encoding, which precludes lazy reading of silent items. Contrary to a lazy reading account, we found that production benefited generated words as much as read words (Experiment 1) and deeply imagined words as much as shallowly imagined words (Experiment 2). We conclude that production stands out as equally distinct-and consequently as equally memorable-regardless of whether it accompanies deep or shallow processing, evidence that is inconsistent with a lazy reading account.

In three experiments, we tested a relative-speed-of-processing account of color-word contingency learning, a phenomenon in which color identification responses to high-contingency stimuli (words that appear most often in particular colors) are faster than those to low-contingency stimuli. Experiment 1 showed equally large contingency-learning effects whether responding was to the colors or to the words, likely due to slow responding to both dimensions because of the unfamiliar mapping required by the key press responses. For Experiment 2, participants switched to vocal responding, in which reading words is considerably faster than naming colors, and we obtained a contingency-learning effect only for color naming, the slower dimension. In Experiment 3, previewing the color information resulted in a reduced contingency-learning effect for color naming, but it enhanced the contingency-learning effect for word reading. These results are all consistent with contingency learning influencing performance only when the nominally irrelevant feature is faster to process than the relevant feature, and therefore are entirely in accord with a relative-speed-of-processing explanation.