SKOOL versus ZOOL: Effects of orthographic and phonological long-term memory on nonword immediate serial recall

Abstract

In a now-classic study Besner and Davelaar (1982) reported an advantage of pseudohomophone (PSH) over nonword recall in a visual immediate serial recall (ISR) task, which remained under articulatory suppression (AS), and interpreted the findings as indicating PSH items obtain support from stored phonological long-term memory (LTM) representations even when phonological rehearsal is disrupted. However, one key question relating to this PSH effect remains: could the results have been contaminated by a potential confound of orthographic familiarity (i.e., PSH items often look like the word they sound like)? As a result, the present study examined the impact of orthography on PSH ISR. Our findings indicate that PSH accuracy was consistently higher for items that had an orthographic similarity to the parent word, and this effect did not interact with concurrent task. We therefore argue that PSH items in ISR obtain independent support from both orthographic and phonological LTM representations. The present study demonstrates the critical impact of orthographic LTM representations on visual nonword ISR, and we suggest that this may be a fruitful avenue for further research.

Keywords:

• Nonwords
• Short-term memory
• Pseudohomophones
• Serial recall

Notes

¹It is also of note that aspects of the methodology of Besner and Davelaar (1982) might have been problematic. Only a small sample of items was used (20 PSHs vs 20 Nonwords) and items were often re-presented a number of times (in Experiment 1, a total of 32 PSH trials (each comprising a list of four items) were presented across silent/suppression conditions, meaning each of the 20 PSHs were presented at least six or seven times).

²The authors would like to thank Max Coltheart and Steve Saunders for very kindly assisting in the selection of these items from the ARC nonword database: items were selected using a computer-based algorithm.

³We would like to thank an anonymous reviewer for this suggestion.