The suffix effect: Postcategorical attributes in a serial recall paradigm

Abstract

A serial list learning paradigm was employed to investigate the role of postcategorical information in producing the stimulus suffix effect (SSE). Serial recall performance was mea· sured for eight-item word lists under four experimental conditions: a control condition (C), where white noise was used as a stimulus suffix; the word-suffix (WS) condition, where list items and suffix were semantically unrelated; the target-suffix condition (TS), in which the final list item and the suffix were from the same category; and the category-suffix condition, in which the final three list elements and the suffix were from the same category. All three verbal suffix conditions produced the SSE, but its magnitUde was reduced when the suffix was semantically related to the last list element. Several pre-and postcategorical explanations of the SSE are evaluated in light of the results.In serial recall tasks, if list items are presented auditorially, the final items in the list are better recalled than if the list is presented visually. This advantage of auditory presentation has been labeled the modality effect, and has been attributed to the contribution of an additional auditory memory store (Crowder & Morton, 1969). The auditory advantage disappears, however, if the recall list is followed by an extra item, even when recall of that item is not required. This decrement in recall performance, called the "stimulus suffix effect" (SSE), can be attributed to the negative effect of the irrelevant item on the information in the auditory store that would otherwise produce the modality effect.One recent version of the auditory store explanation assumes that the additional memory component responsible for the advantage of auditory presentation is organized precategorically (Crowder, 1978). In this context, categorical refers to the point in information processing at which contact is first made between new input and learned linguistic categories. The precategorical model proposes that the auditory memory of this echoic component is functionally uncorrelated with the whole semantic or categorical memory system, and resides in a separate store called precategorical acoustic storage (PAS) (Crowder & Morton, 1969). Stimulus information in the PAS is carried as raw auditory sensory energy and is subject to only primitive processing. For categorization to occur, a further stage of information processing that compares the auditory memory in PAS with the learned linguistic information is necessary. According to the precategorical model, the SSE is the result of displacement of the precategorical acoustic traces by the incoming information at a first stage of processing.A second hypothesis concerning the manner of Copyright © 1979 Psychonomic Society, Inc. 35 organization in this echoic component assumes that information storage is postcategorical. The postcategorical model, discussed by Salter and Colley (I 977), proposes that simultaneous to its storage at a sensory level, auditory information is registered against its permanent categorical ...

Modality effects and the structure of short-term verbal memory

“…Harris, Gausepohl, Lewis, and Spoehr (1979) and Salter and Colley (1977) found that the effect of a suffix upon the terminal list item was reduced if the…”