Measures of free recall of 900 English nouns: Correlations with imagery, concreteness, meaningfulness, and frequency

Abstract

Forty groups of subjects were given six lists of 25 nouns each for immediate free written recall. A measure of free recall was thereby obtained for each of 900 nouns in the Paivio, Yuille, and Madigan (1968) norms, each noun's measure based on the recall of 32 subjects. First-order correlations showed recall to be correlated with imagery, concreteness, meaningfulness, Thorndike-Lorge frequency, and Kucera-Francis frequency. Partial correlations showed meaningfulness to be essentially unrelated to recall and concreteness only moderately related. In contrast to previous comparisons, which were based on smaller ranges of frequency and were more susceptible to list-specific effects, imagery and frequency were found to be approximately equal in their influence on free recall.Presented with this report are measures of free recall for 900 of the 925 English nouns in the Paivio, Yuille, and Madigan (1968) norms. Several considerations led us to obtain these measures. The first was the general issue of which particular attributes of words affect free recall. It is well established in the Paivio et al. data that attributes suspected to influence recall are themselves correlated. Thus, if a relationship between a variable and recall performance is observed, it is important to establish that the effect is not due to contamination by other variables. Considerable effort has been spent along these lines and the influence of rated imagery on free recall seems firmly established (Postman, 1975). However, there are some recent complications with this picture (Richardson 1975a(Richardson , 1975b, and the roles of rated meaningfulness and frequency remain ambiguous. A second consideration was the issue of which variable has the greater influence on recall. Since Paivio's (l971) review there has been an increased acceptance of the view that rated imagery is more influential than meaningfulness and frequency. However, in contrast to the weight of evidence implicating the effect of rated imagery on free recall, the claim that imagery is more influential than frequency and meaningfulness is based on very few studies.Two more immediate concerns compelled the collection of these measures. The first was the outcome of an experiment by Warren (1977), who examined the effect of a pursuit-rotor task on recall by subjectsThe authors thank Patti Craig, Rena Dreskin, and Paige Highfield, who not only helped collect data, but also contributed to the research at other stages. We also thank M. Frank Evarts for his help with the unpublished study described in the introduction. Requests for reprints should be sent to Keith Clayton, 134 Wesley Hall, Department of Psychology, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee 37240. engaged in recall and tracking concurrently. In two experiments Warren found that the recall-eoncurrent task interfered with picture recall but not word recall. This is consistent with the view that a concurrent tracking task interferes with, or suppresses, imagery during recall. If this is so, and if the superior recall of con...

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“…We used two of the word lists here that were previously developed for other studies of verbal learning in our lab (Stricker et al 2006). Words were chosen from those normed for recallability by Christian et al (1978) (Christian 1978), and each list was matched for recallability, word length, concreteness, and imagery. List order was counterbalanced across subjects.…”

Associative asymmetry, availability, and retrieval

“…Recall values are currently available for only one such set of words. Christian et al (1978) had subjects recalllists of words using a standard list-learning paradigm in order to obtain percentage recalled values for 899 of Paivio, Yuille, and Madigan's (1968) 925 nouns. A total of 32 subjects saw each word.…”

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