Abstract
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.
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This work is based on a master’s thesis by the first author, supervised by the second author. It was supported in part by NSF Grants 9123865-DBS and SBR-9601465 to the second author.
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Li, X., Schweickert, R. & Gandour, J. The phonological similarity effect in immediate recall: Positions of shared phonemes. Memory & Cognition 28, 1116–1125 (2000). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03211813
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03211813