Murdock has shown that the immediate free recall of a list of words is adversely affected by a concurrent card-sorting task, with degree of impairment increasing with the number of sorting alternatives. He interprets this in terms of a limited capacity STM mechanism. The present study repeats Murdock's study with the addition of an STM control, a condition in which recall was delayed for 30 sec. by a rehearsal-preventing task. Card-sorting load influenced the long-term component (measured by delayed recall), but not the short-term component (measured by subtracting delayed from immediate recall). It is suggested that the limited capacity system affects input into LTM rather than STM.