Abstract
Phonological similarity effects were used to assess the role of acoustic coding in verbal complex span, a processing-plus-storage measure found to correlate significantly with aspects of complex cognition. Three experiments demonstrated consistent effects of phonological similarity on listening span. These effects appeared relatively insensitive to manipulations of task materials (Experiment 1) and differences in processing task demands (Experiments 2 and 3). The results were interpreted as reflecting a significant role for the phonological loop in supporting verbal complex span and a multicomponent view of working memory, as tapped by these tests. Phonological similarity did not significantly interact with aspects of the tasks varied across Experiments 1 to 3, suggesting a relative robustness of the effect. However, variation in the phonological similarity effect sizes across Experiments 1 to 3 supports the suggestion that task demands and characteristics have the potential to disrupt the phonological similarity effect and, by implication, the reliance on a phonological code.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Alastair Smith and Sara Williams for their help in preparing the stimuli. Robert Clark provided invaluable help in administering Experiment 3. All experiments were conducted whilst the authors were at the University of Bristol, which provided funds and facilities to support the work.
This work formed part of the first author's PhD thesis and was supported in part (Experiments 1 and 2) by an ESRC postgraduate studentship.