Effects of acoustic and semantic similarity on short-term paired-associate learning.

Abstract

The coding system used in short‐term paired‐associate learning was investigated by studying the effects of acoustic and semantic similarity. Performance was affected by acoustic similarity (Expts. IV, V and VI), while semantic similarity had no reliable effect (Expts. II and III). Serial position curves suggested that the primary and secondary memory components of the task were equally affected by acoustic similarity. The implications of this for the relationship between acoustic similarity and short‐term memory are discussed.