The effect of semantic relatedness on immediate serial recall and serial recognition

Abstract

The present study examined the effects of semantic relatedness on immediate serial recall and serial recognition. Each participant received either blocked or randomly intermixed serial recall or serial recognition trials. Replicating the findings of previous studies (e.g., Saint-Aubin, Ouellette, & Poirier, 2005), semantic relatedness boosted percentage serial recall but also increased order errors, after taking into account the proportion of correctly recalled items, regardless of their orders, in serial recall trials. In serial recognition trials, participants’ responses were slower and less accurate for related lists than for unrelated lists. There were intraindividual correlations among order memory measures in serial recall versus serial recognition trials. The implications of these findings for item redintegration theories are discussed.

Keywords:

• Item redintegration
• Memory for order
• Semantic relatedness
• Serial recall
• Serial recognition

Acknowledgments

We thank Jean Saint-Aubin and Gerry Tehan for their comments on earlier versions of this manuscript and Dana Schiffman and Jacalynn Romeyn for their assistance with data collection.

Notes

¹ Purser and Jarrold (2010) reported that semantic relatedness had a negative effect for the first two serial positions of a 4-item serial recognition test for 5–6-year old children. However, this “serial recognition” test involves distinguishing the correct sequence from the sequence with semantic foils (e.g., replacing queen by king), so their findings may not be related to short-term order memory.

² As in Tse (2009), differences in interitem and theme–item associative strength for associative versus category lists were significant. However, Tse showed that there was no list-type difference on serial recall conditionalized order errors. Also, the current foci were the semantic relatedness effect in serial recognition and the relationship among order measures in serial recall and recognition, so the associative versus category differences are only briefly discussed.

³ Because the difference scores (e.g., semantic relatedness effects) tend to be less reliable and more restricted in their variance than the absolute scores (e.g., percentage serial recall in one condition; e.g., Peter, Churchill, & Brown, 1993; we thank an anonymous reviewer for pointing this out), we did not perform correlation analyses for the semantic relatedness effects in serial recall and serial recognition trials.

⁴ We thank Jean Saint-Aubin for suggesting this strategy.

⁵ We thank Gerry Tehan for suggesting this possibility.