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.

[1]  B. J. Winer.  Statistical Principles in Experimental Design , 1992 .

[2]  A. Paivio,et al.  Concreteness, imagery, and meaningfulness values for 925 nouns. , 1968, Journal of experimental psychology.

[3]  A. Paivio,et al.  Noun imagery and meaningfulness in free and serial recall , 1969 .

[4]  Instructions, Noun Imagery, and Priority in Free Recall , 1970 .

[5]  J. Richardson,et al.  Concreteness and Imageability , 1975 .

[6]  J. Richardson,et al.  Imagery, Concreteness, and Lexical Complexity , 1975 .

[7]  Allan Paivio,et al.  Word imagery, frequency, and meaningfulness in short-term memory , 1971 .

[8]  Murdock,et al.  The serial position effect of free recall , 1962 .

[9]  H. Kucera,et al.  Computational analysis of present-day American English , 1967 .

[10]  A. Paivio.  Imagery and verbal processes , 1972 .

[11]  J. Bastian,et al.  Recall of abstract and concrete words equated for meaningfulness , 1966 .

[12]  W. A. Winnick,et al.  TACHISTOSCOPIC RECOGNITION THRESHOLDS, PAIRED-ASSOCIATE LEARNING, AND FREE RECALL AS A FUNCTION OF ABSTRACTNESS-CONCRETENESS AND WORD FREQUENCY. , 1965, Journal of experimental psychology.

[13]  G. Frincke.  Word characteristics, associative-relatedness, and the free-recall of nouns , 1968 .

[14]  Michael W. Warren.  The effects of recall-concurrent visual-motor distraction on picture and word recall , 1977, Memory & cognition.

[15]  L. Postman.  Verbal Learning and Memory , 1975 .

[16]  Allan Paivio,et al.  A factor-analytic study of word attributes and verbal learning. , 1968 .