A multinomial processing tree model for degradation and redintegration in immediate recall

When items are presented for immediate recall, a verbal trace is formed and degrades quickly, becoming useless after about 2 sec. The span for items such as digits equals the number of items that canbe pronounced in the available time. The length of the items affects span by affecting pronunciation rate. Other properties, such as phonological similarity and lexicality, can affect span without affecting pronunciation rate. These properties change the trace's useful lifetime by affecting redintegration. An analogy is drawn between trace reconstruction and repair of errors in speech. When a trace is degraded, one process attempts to form a phoneme string, and another process attempts to form a word. The two processes are autonomous and can be selectively influenced by lexicality and phonological similarity. The resulting processing tree models make simple predictions that depend on whether or not the influenced processes are sequential. The results are illustrated with data from experiments by Besner and Davelaar (1982).

[1]  Mechanism in thought and morals , 1871 .

[2]  R. Brener,et al.  An experimental investigation of memory span , 1940 .

[3]  G. A. Miller.  THE PSYCHOLOGICAL REVIEW THE MAGICAL NUMBER SEVEN, PLUS OR MINUS TWO: SOME LIMITS ON OUR CAPACITY FOR PROCESSING INFORMATION 1 , 1956 .

[4]  John Brown.  Some Tests of the Decay Theory of Immediate Memory , 1958 .

[5]  L. R. Peterson,et al.  Short-term retention of individual verbal items. , 1959, Journal of experimental psychology.

[6]  J. F. Mackworth.  The duration of the visual image. , 1963 .

[7]  S. Sternberg.  Memory-scanning: mental processes revealed by reaction-time experiments. , 1969, American scientist.

[8]  George Sperling,et al.  6 – Acoustic Similarity and Auditory Short-Term Memory: Experiments and a Model , 1970 .

[9]  J. Fodor,et al.  The Psychology of Language , 1974 .

[10]  A. Baddeley,et al.  Word length and the structure of short-term memory , 1975 .

[11]  M. F. Garrett,et al.  The Analysis of Sentence Production1 , 1975 .

[12]  Richard A. Chechile,et al.  A Bayesian procedure for separately estimating storage and retrieval components of forgetting , 1976 .

[13]  W. Estes,et al.  Order and position in primary memory for letter strings , 1977 .

[14]  R. Shiffrin,et al.  Short-term forgetting of item and order information. , 1978 .

[15]  Anne Cutler,et al.  Monitoring sentence comprehension , 1979 .

[16]  Nick C. Ellis,et al.  A bilingual word‐length effect: Implications for intelligence testing and the relative ease of mental calculation in Welsh and English , 1980 .

[17]  P. Muter,et al.  Very rapid forgetting , 1980, Memory & cognition.

[18]  L. Standing,et al.  Is the immediate memory span determined by subvocalization rate , 1980 .

[19]  Derek Besner,et al.  Basic processes in reading: Two phonological codes. , 1982 .

[20]  S. W. Link,et al.  QUANTITATIVE METHODS IN PSYCHOLOGY Correcting Response Measures for Guessing and Partial Information , 1982 .

[21]  W. Levelt,et al.  Monitoring and self-repair in speech , 1983, Cognition.

[22]  Charles Hulme,et al.  Speech Rate and the Development of Short-Term Memory Span. , 1984 .

[23]  R. Schweickert,et al.  Separable effects of factors on speed and accuracy: memory scanning, lexical decision, and choice tasks. , 1985, Psychological bulletin.

[24]  N. Cowan,et al.  The use of auditory and phonetic memory in vowel discrimination. , 1986, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[25]  Geoffrey E. Hinton,et al.  Learning and relearning in Boltzmann machines , 1986 .

[26]  G S Dell,et al.  A spreading-activation theory of retrieval in sentence production. , 1986, Psychological review.

[27]  Jeffrey L. Elman,et al.  Interactive processes in speech perception: the TRACE model , 1986 .

[28]  William H. Batchelder,et al.  The statistical analysis of a model for storage and retrieval processes in human memory , 1986 .

[29]  B. Boruff,et al.  Short-term memory capacity: magic number or magic spell? , 1986, Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition.

[30]  R A Chechile,et al.  Trace susceptibility theory. , 1987, Journal of experimental psychology. General.

[31]  Anne Cutler,et al.  Phoneme identification and the lexicon , 1987, Cognitive Psychology.

[32]  David M. Riefer,et al.  Multinomial Modeling and the Measurement of Cognitive Processes. , 1988 .

[33]  N. Martin,et al.  Variables influencing the occurrence of naming errors: Implications for models of lexical retrieval☆ , 1989 .

[34]  C. Hulme,et al.  Working Memory Development: The Effects of Speech Rate, Word Length, and Acoustic Similarity on Serial Recall. , 1989 .

[35]  R. Schweickert,et al.  Phonological Similarity, Pronunciation Rate, and Memory Span , 1990 .

[36]  M. Potter,et al.  Regeneration in the short-term recall of sentences , 1990 .

[37]  David M. Riefer,et al.  Multinomial processing models of source monitoring. , 1990 .

[38]  J. S. Nairne,et al.  Positional uncertainty in long-term memory , 1991, Memory & cognition.

[39]  Gordon D. A. Brown,et al.  Memory for familiar and unfamiliar words: Evidence for a long-term memory contribution to short-term memory span , 1991 .

[40]  David W. Carroll,et al.  Psychology of Language , 1993 .