Reporting words from the eye or the ear: to write or to speak?

Two experiments are described which investigate whether memory performance is better with written or oral recall of a letter string. Together they demonstrate that spoken forward serial recall of auditorily-presented material has a detrimental effect on recall of the last few items of the string. This impairment may be circumvented by recalling the last items first. Moreover, if the items are presented close together in time the disruptive effect of spoken recall is emphasized. It is suggested that this effect arises from the overwriting by speech of the contents of a time-limited acoustic or phonological store. This store may be the articulatory loop postulated by Baddeley and Hitch (1974). The results are discussed in terms of the compatibility of input to output modality in the design of displays.