All parts of an item are not equal: Effects of phonological redundancy on immediate recall

Abstract

The process of redintegration is thought to use top-down knowledge to repair partly damaged memory traces. We explored redintegration in the immediate recall of lists from a limited pool of partly phonologically redundant pseudowords. In Experiment 1, four kinds of stimuli were created by adding the syllable /ne/ to two-syllablepseudowords, either to the middle (/tepa/ vs. /tenepa/) or to the end (/tepane/), or adding a different syllable to each item (/tepalo/, /vuropi/). The repeated syllable was thought to be available for redintegration. Lists of two-syllable pseudowords were recalled best, items with a redundant end were intermediate,and items with a redundant middle-syllable were as hard as nonredundant three-syllableitems. In Experiment 2, the last syllable was predictable from context but not shared between all stimuli, reducing phonological similaritybetween items. Performance did not differ from the situation with identical last syllables. In Experiment 3, a shared first syllable had a detrimental effect on memory. An error analysis showed that beneficial redundancy effects were accompanied by harmful similarity effects, impairing memory for nonredundant syllables. The balance between the two effects depended on syllable position.

Why does the phonological similarity effect reverse with nonwords?

“…In serial recall PSE occurred for words and was reversed with nonwords, consistent with previous findings. The positive PSE on nonword recall has now been established as a robust effect that occurs with different types of phonological similarity , across different presentation rates (Lian et al, 2001), with auditorily and visually presented nonword trigrams Karlsen & Lian, 2005;Nimmo & Roodenrys, 2005, in press), as well as with two-and three-syllable nonwords (Luotoniemi et al, Submitted;Service & Maury, 2003;Service et al, 2005). In serial reconstruction, on the other hand, words and nonwords behaved in much the same way in the current study.…”

“…The finding that phonological similarity had a positive effect on ISR of nonwords has been replicated with different types ofphonological similarity (Lianet al, 2004;, with different presentation rates (Lian et al, 2001), with auditorily and visually presented nonword trigrams Nimmo & Roodenrys, 2005, in press), as well as with two-and three-syllable nonwords (Luotoniemi, Service & Maury, Submitted;Service & Maury, 2003;Service, Maury & Luotoniemi, 2005). The original finding seemed to suggest that PSE was restricted to familiar material that has distinct lexical representations in longterm memory, contrary to the predictions by the phonological loop hypothesis and the feature model.…”

Reexamining the phonological similarity effect in immediate serial recall: The roles of type of similarity, category cuing, and item recall

“…The list-based measure entails a binary scoring, in that a list is either correct or incorrect, based on whether all its items were recalled in correct serial position; a partially correct list is scored as completely incorrect. This measure is quite common and has been used by a number of investigators, including some of the seminal studies that established the classic PSE, as well as in very recent studies (e.g., Baddeley, 1966;Service & Maury, 2003). Recall was, therefore, also assessed in terms of this measure, primarily to verify that the classic PSE (dissimilar Ͼ canonical) was, in fact, obtained using this classic measure.…”

“…Recently, Lambert, Chang, and Lin (2003) reported a beneficial effect of phonological similarity on pharmacists' immediate free recall of drug names. Beneficial effects of similarity have also recently been reported for strict serial recall in immediate serial recall of nonword lists, where similarity was operationalized as rhyme Service & Maury, 2003) or as consonant frame overlap , Experiment 1). To our knowledge, however, there has been no previous demonstration of a beneficial effect of phonological similarity on strict serial recall in a typical immediate (i.e., nondelayed) serial recall task employing known words.…”

The effect of referent similarity and phonological similarity on concurrent word learning

“…Using three-syllable nonwords, Service & Maury (2003) compared the effects of the phonological similarity on immediate serial recall when the items shared the first, the second or the last syllable. Error rate as the function of overlapped position revealed a general pattern: a helpful effect on the recall of the redundant syllables and a harmful effect on all the other syllables.…”