Effects of Vocabulary Size and Acoustic Similarity on Serial Recall of Mouthed Stimuli

Abstract

Abstract The characteristics of mouthed recency and suffix effects found in immediate serial recall tasks with visually presented stimuli were examined. In past research enhanced recency with mouthing when stimuli were drawn from Size 8 but not Size 3 vocabularies was found (Turner et al., 1987). One cause for these findings may have been differences in the acoustic similarity between items from the Size 3 and Size 8 vocabularies. In the present experiment the degree of similarity was manipulated for vocabulary Sizes 3 and 8. The mouthed or passively read letters were acoustically similar, dissimilar, or mixed. The results replicated the vocabulary size effects found in Turner et al. but were not confounded by the acoustic similarity of the list items. Mouthed recency and suffix effects were found in recall of Size 8 but not Size 3 vocabularies, and the vocabulary size effects were found regardless of acoustic similarity. Conversely, research has found auditory recency and suffix effects to be dependent o...