The phonological similarity effect in immediate recall : Positions of shared phonemes

• Published in: Memory & cognition Vol. 28; no. 7; pp. 1116 - 1125
• Main Authors: XIAOJIAN LI, SCHWEICKERT, Richard, GANDOUR, Jack
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Austin, TX Psychonomic Society 01.10.2000; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Attention; Biological and medical sciences; Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology; Human; Humans; Learning. Memory; Memory; Memory, Short-Term; Phonetics; Phonology; Psycholinguistics; Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry; Psychology. Psychophysiology; Recall; Semantics; Serial Learning; Short term; Human; Language; Similarity; Memory; Phonology; Cognition; Recall; Experimental study; Phonem
• ISSN: 0090-502X; 1532-5946
• DOI: 10.3758/BF03211813

Earlier literature proposes two ways phonological similarity could harm immediate recall: (1) It could increase the degradation of the representations of items in memory, or (2) it could decrease the probability that a degraded representation is correctly reconstructed. A multinomial processing tree model for each hypothesis was used to analyze an immediate recall experiment. Both gave a good account of the data, but, of the two, results favor the hypothesis that the effect of phonological similarity is to impair reconstruction of degraded representations. A second issue is whether positions of repeated phonemes in phonologically similar items matter. We found that mere repetition of phonemes produced a phonological similarity effect. Repeated phonemes in the same positions appeared to produce a greater effect. A final finding is that when reading rate was preequated, phonological similarity affected memory span by changing the time taken to recall a list of span length.