Overwriting of phonemic features in serial recall

Abstract

We tested two explanations of the phonological similarity effect in verbal short‐term memory: The confusion hypothesis assumes that serial positions of similar items are confused. The overwriting hypothesis states that similar items share feature representations, which are overwritten. Participants memorised a phonologically dissimilar list of CVC‐trigrams (Experiment 1) or words (Experiment 2 and 3) for serial recall. In the retention interval they read aloud other items. The material of the distractor task jointly overlapped one item of the memory list. The recall of this item was impaired, and the effect was not based on intrusions from the distractor task alone. The results provide evidence for feature overwriting as one potential mechanism contributing to the phonological similarity effect.

Notes

Correspondence should be addressed to Elke B. Lange, University of Potsdam, Allgemeine Psychologie I, PO Box 60 15 53, 14415 Potsdam, Germany. Email: [email protected]‐potsdam.de

This research was funded through Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) grant OB 121/2‐3. We thank Christina Koerner, Nadine Meyer, and Petra Grüttner for their assistance with collecting the data.

The nonparametric Wilcoxon test was chosen because the small numbers of errors in some categories render the assumption of normal distribution doubtful.

Bearing in mind that there is still a discussion about which of the sounds have a status as phonemes or are allophones of this phoneme, we decided to use neither a very conservative nor a very liberal selection of phonemes (Wiese, 1996). A complete list of the phonemes we treated as distinct is available from the authors.

As one reviewer pointed out, the fact that the second list was read aloud may have made it easier to discriminate between the lists as sources for potential recall candidates.