Language habits, acoustic confusability, and immediate memory for redundant letter sequences

Abstract

Immediate memory was tested for sequences of 7, 8, 9, or 10 auditorily presented letters which comprised either words or zero-, first-, second-, or third-order approximations to English words. At all lengths, recall probability correlated highly with letter sequence predictability (.58–.78) but was unrelated to acoustic confusability. It is suggested that coding was still phonemic but involved speech sounds comprising several letters rather than letter names.