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-syllable pseudowords, 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-syllable items. In Experiment 2, the last syllable was predictable from context but not shared between all stimuli, reducing phonological similarity between 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.
Article PDF
Similar content being viewed by others
Avoid common mistakes on your manuscript.
References
Baddeley, A. [D.] (1986).Working memory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, Clarendon Press.
Baddeley, A. [D.], &Andrade, J. (1994). Reversing the word-length effect: A comment on Caplan, Rochon, and Waters.Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology,47A, 1047–1054.
Baddeley, A. D., &Hitch, G. (1974). Working memory. In G. H. Bower (Ed.),The psychology of learning and motivation (Vol. 8, pp. 47–89). New York: Academic Press.
Baddeley, A. D., Thomson, N., &Buchanan, M. (1975). Word length and the structure of short-term memory.Journal of Verbal Learning & Verbal Behavior,14, 575–589.
Brown, G. D. A., &Hulme, C. (1995). Modeling item length effects in memory span: No rehearsal needed?Journal of Memory & Language,34, 594–621.
Brown, R., &McNeill, D. (1966). The “tip of the tongue” phenomenon.Journal of Verbal Learning & Verbal Behavior,5, 325–337.
Caplan, D., Rochon, E., &Waters, G. (1992). Articulatory and phonological determinants of word length effects in span tasks.Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology,45A, 177–192.
Caplan, D., &Waters, G. S. (1994). Articulatory length and phonological similarity in span tasks: A reply to Baddeley and Andrade.Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology,47A, 1055–1062.
Caramazza, A., &Miozzo, M. (1997). The relation between syntactic and phonological knowledge in lexical access: Evidence from the “tip-of-the-tongue” phenomenon.Cognition,64, 309–343.
Conrad, R., &Hull, A. J. (1964). Information, acoustic confusion and memory span.British Journal of Psychology,55, 429–432.
Fallon, A. B., Groves, K., &Tehan, G. (1999). Phonological similarity and trace degradation in the serial recall task: When CAT helps RAT but not MAN.International Journal of Psychology,34, 301–307.
Gathercole, S. E., Frankish, C. R., Pickering, S. J., &Peaker, S. [M.] (1999). Phonotactic influences on short-term memory.Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, & Cognition,25, 84–95.
Gathercole, S. E., Pickering, S. J., Hall, M., &Peaker, S. M. (2001). Dissociable lexical and phonological influences on serial recognition and serial recall.Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology,54A, 1–30.
Hartley, T., &Houghton, G. (1996). A linguistically constrained model of short-term memory for nonwords.Journal of Memory & Language,35, 1–31.
Hulme, C., Maughan, S., &Brown, G. D. (1991). Memory for familiar and unfamiliar words: Evidence for a long-term memory contribution to short-term memory span.Journal of Memory & Language,30, 685–701.
Hulme, C., Newton, P., Cowan, N., Stuart, G., &Brown, G. (1999). Think before you speak: Pauses, memory search, and trace redintegration processes in verbal memory span.Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, & Cognition,25, 447–463.
Knott, R., Patterson, K., &Hodges, J. R. (2000). The role of speech production in auditory short-term memory: Evidence from progressive fluent aphasia.Neuropsychologia,38, 125–142.
Laine, M., &Martin, N. (1996). Lexical retrieval deficit in picture naming: Implications for word production models.Brain & Language,53, 283–314.
Li, X., Schweickert, R., &Gandour, J. (2000). The phonological similarity effect in immediate recall: Positions of shared phonemes.Memory & Cognition,28, 1116–1125.
Longoni, A. M., Richardson, J. T. E., &Aiello, A. (1993). Articulatory rehearsal and phonological storage in working memory.Memory & Cognition,21, 11–22.
Murray, A., & Jones, D. M. (in press). No, Welsh digits are not shorter than English digits when spoken: Implications for the character of subvocal rehearsal.Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, & Cognition.
Nairne, J. S. (1990). A feature model of immediate memory.Memory & Cognition,18, 251–269.
Posner, M. I. (1966). On the role of interference in short-term retention.Journal of Experimental Psychology,72, 221–231.
Roodenrys, S., Hulme, C., Lethbridge, A., Hinton, M., & Nimmo, L. M. (in press). Word frequency and phonological neighborhood effects on verbal short-term memory.Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, & Cognition.
Sadeniemi, M. (1990).Nykysuomen sanakirja [Dictionary of modern Finnish] (18th ed., Vol. 2). Porvoo: Werner Söderström Osakeyhtiö.
Saint-Aubin, J., &Poirier, M. (2000). Immediate serial recall of words and nonwords: Tests of the retrieval-based hypothesis.Psychonomic Bulletin & Review,7, 332–340.
Schweickert, R. (1993). A multinomial processing tree model for degradation and redintegration in immediate recall.Memory & Cognition,21, 168–175.
Service, E. (1998). The effect of word-length on immediate serial recall depends on phonological complexity, not articulatory duration.Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology,51A, 283–304.
Tuomi, T. (1980).Suomen kielen käänteissanakirja [Reverse dictionary of modern standard Finnish] (2nd rev. ed.). Hämeenlinna: Finnish Literature Society.
Westbury, C., Buchanan, L., &Brown, N. R. (2002). Sounds of the neighborhood: False memories and the structure of the phonological lexicon.Journal of Memory & Language,46, 622–651.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Electronic supplementary material
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Service, E., Maury, S. All parts of an item are not equal: Effects of phonological redundancy on immediate recall. Memory & Cognition 31, 273–284 (2003). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03194386
Received:
Accepted:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03194386