Distinctive feature codes in the short-term memory of children

Abstract

The present studies investigated the use of distinctive feature codes in shortterm memory tasks by young, school-aged children. Each child was presented with 30 lists of consonant-vowel (CV) syllables for recall. In each list, the initial consonants were different, being drawn from the set of six English stop consonants. The data of interest were the errors in recall, which were not random as would be the case had the encoding unit been the entire consonantal phone. Rather the errors had distinctive features in common with the presented sound. Thus, children encode the consonantal phones into sets of unique features which are recalled independently at times.