Measures of free recall of 900 English nouns: Correlations with imagery, concreteness, meaningfulness, and frequency

Forty groups of subjects were given six lists of 25 nouns each for immediate free written recall. A measure of free recall was thereby obtained for each of 900 nouns in the Paivio, Yuille, and Madigan (1968) norms, each noun’s measure based on the recall of 32 subjects. First-order correlations showed recall to be correlated with imagery, concreteness, meaningfulness, Thorndike-Lorge frequency, and Kuěra-Francis frequency. Partial correlations showed meaningfulness to be essentially unrelated to recall and concreteness only moderately related. In contrast to previous comparisons, which were based on smaller ranges of frequency and were more susceptible to list-specific effects, imagery and frequency were found to be approximately equal in their influence on free recall.

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