Phonological Similarity Effects in Simple and Complex Word Spans

Phonological Similarity Effects in Simple and Complex Word Spans Roopali Misra (g0501312@nus.edu.sg) Department of Psychology, National University of Singapore 11 Law Link, Singapore 117570, Singapore Winston D. Goh (psygohw@nus.edu.sg) Department of Psychology, National University of Singapore 11 Law Link, Singapore 117570, Singapore of phonological similarity elicited by simple versus complex span tasks as reported by Copeland and Radvansky (2001). In simple span tasks such as digit span and word span, participants are typically presented with lists of digits or words that vary in the number (list length) of items to be memorized. The task usually begins with a short list length of 2 or 3 items and the list length is then gradually incremented in subsequent trials. Participants are required to recall the items in the order they were presented. The simple span procedure is probably the most commonly used technique to investigate serial recall performance. In complex span tasks such as reading span (Daneman & Carpenter, 1980), participants are given sentences to read and simultaneously memorize the last word of each sentence. For example, participants may read these three sentences: Abstract Memory span for a list of phonologically similar words is generally worse than memory span for a list of phonologically dissimilar words, a finding that is called the phonological similarity effect. This finding has often been cited as evidence for the use of phonological coding in short-term memory and working memory. However, some studies have demonstrated a reversal of the phonological similarity effect under certain conditions. One such condition is the use of more complex memory span tasks such as reading span. It has been suggested that sentence contexts may provide additional retrieval cues that may overcome the detrimental effects of phonological similarity. The present study examined this hypothesis by manipulating the sentence contexts of the reading span materials. No evidence showing phonological similarity facilitation was found; in fact, the standard phonological similarity decrement in recall was observed with high context sentences. Non-performers who are considered useless are fired by the boss. While surfing on the internet, every click leads to another link. For all humans living in the world shelter is a basic need. Keywords: Phonological similarity; short-term memory; working memory; serial recall; sentence context. Introduction One of the most well explored phenomenon in short-term memory research is the phonological similarity effect first reported by Conrad and Hull (1964). When a participant is presented similar and dissimilar sounding items to memorize in a serial recall task, performance is generally worse for lists of words such as cat, mat, and hat or letters such as C, D, B, and V, compared to lists of words or letters that do not sound similar. However, some recent studies have found that phonological similarity does not always lead to a decrement in memory performance and in some cases, the effect reverses, i.e., performance for phonologically similar items is better than dissimilar items. Copeland and Radvansky (2001) observed that the traditional phonological similarity decrement was obtained for word span tasks where participants memorized lists of isolated words, but a phonological similarity facilitation was observed for reading span tasks in which participants read sentences and were required to recall the last word of each sentence. Other researchers have also reported reversals of the phonological similarity effect for order reconstruction tasks (Nairne & Kelley, 1999) and nonword recall (Lian, Karlsen & Eriksen, 2004). The present study will focus on the opposing effects They are then required to recall boss, link, and need at the end of the sequence. A variant of this complex span procedure is the operation span task (Turner & Engle, 1989). In this method, the sentences in the reading span task are replaced with the verification of mathematical equations such as “Is 5/10 + 3 = 2? ”. After participants verified the equation, they are then given a word to be memorized before the next equation is shown and so on. In both types of complex span, the idea is to make participants process something while trying to remember words. Copeland and Radvansky (2001) compared the performance on phonologically similar and dissimilar words using word, reading, and operation span tasks. In word and operation span, the traditional phonological similarity effect was observed. Only the results for reading span found a reversal of the phonological similarity effect. The authors suggest that sentence contexts may provide additional retrieval cues that may overcome the detrimental effects of phonological similarity in the reading span tasks. In word and operation span tasks, the knowledge that all the words within a list rhyme may presumably provide a cue to limit