Conditional and unconditional co-occurrence restrictions in the recall of bigrams

Abstract

Previous investigations of the free recall of structured bigrams have concluded that Ss are unable to learn simple co-occurrence restrictions; however, only co-occurrence restrictions conditional upon the position in which each component letter occurs have been studied. Results of the present experiment suggest that Ss can and do make use of unconditional co-occurrence restrictions such as those found in a set of bigrams constructed from two classes of letters with the restriction that both letters appearing in a bigram must be drawn from the same class.