Reexamining the phonological similarity effect in immediate serial recall: The roles of type of similarity, category cuing, and item recall

Study of the phonological similarity effect (PSE) in immediate serial recall (ISR) has produced a conflicting body of results. Five experiments tested various theoretical ideas that together may help integrate these results. Experiments 1 and 2 tested alternative accounts that explain the effect of phonological similarity on item recall in terms of feature overlap, linguistic structure, or serial order. In each experiment, the participants’ ISR was assessed for rhyming, alliterative, and similar nonrhyming/ nonalliterative lists. The results were consistent with the predictions of the serial order account, with item recall being higher for rhyming than for alliterative lists and higher for alliterative than for similar nonrhyming/nonalliterative lists. Experiments 3 and 4 showed that these item recall differences are reduced when list items repeat across lists. Experiment 5 employed rhyming and dissimilar onesyllable and two-syllable lists to demonstrate that recall for similar (rhyming) lists can be better than that for dissimilar lists even in a typical ISR task in which words are used, providing a direct reversal of the classic PSE. These and other previously published results are interpreted and integrated within a proposed theoretical framework that offers an account of the PSE.

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