Abstract
Theories of verbal rehearsal usually assume that whole words are being rehearsed. However, words consist of letter sequences, or syllables, or word onset-vowel-coda, amongst many other conceptualizations of word structure. A more general term is the ‘grain size’ of word units (Ziegler and Goswami, 2005). In the current study, a new method measured the quantitative percentage of correctly remembered word structure. The amount of letters in the correct letter sequence as per cent of word length was calculated, disregarding missing or added letters. A forced rehearsal was tested by repeating each memory list four times. We tested low frequency (LF) English words versus geographical (UK) town names to control for content. We also tested unfamiliar international (INT) non-words and names of international (INT) European towns to control for familiarity. An immediate versus distributed repetition was tested with a between-subject design. Participants responded with word fragments in their written recall especially when they had to remember unfamiliar words. While memory of whole words was sensitive to content, presentation distribution and individual sex and language differences, recall of word fragments was not. There was no trade-off between memory of word fragments with whole word recall during the repetition, instead also word fragments significantly increased. Moreover, while whole word responses correlated with each other during repetition, and word fragment responses correlated with each other during repetition, these two types of word recall responses were not correlated with each other. Thus there may be a lower layer consisting of free, sparse word fragments and an upper layer that consists of language-specific, orthographically and semantically constrained words.
Highlights
Repetition is one of the most interesting phenomena because it captures the transition from the first strenuous effort at solving a task to an automatized and much more effortless process (Logan, 1990; Fecteau and Munoz, 2003)
Averaged values give information about the overall ease of pronunciation of a word because difficult phoneme transitions can be ameliorated by easier phoneme transition (Coleman and Pierrehumbert, 1997). These phonotactic value (PTV) are more commonly used in studies where words need to be articulated as part of the experimental design in order to control for the ease to pronounce a word
If there is a gradual approximation during rehearsal toward the correct whole word, we expected that word fragments should decrease during rehearsal/repetition and would correlate with the whole word score in the subsequent block
Summary
Repetition is one of the most interesting phenomena because it captures the transition from the first strenuous effort at solving a task to an automatized and much more effortless process (Logan, 1990; Fecteau and Munoz, 2003). Networks always needed 200 sweeps independently whether a graphic or a phonological code was used, or homogeneous or mixed lists had to be learned – it just queued the stimuli into a sequence for output (Lange-Küttner, 2011; see Mitchell and Zipser, 2003) This early Ebbinghaus experiment showed that we do not necessarily need rehearse just whole words. The current study investigates whether rehearsal in a verbal recall task may involve word fragments. This hypothesis is backed up by recent work that shows that word structure is relevant for reading (Lange-Küttner, 2005) as well as for word memory (LangeKüttner and Krappmann, 2011). Similar response evaluations that distinguished between partially correct and completely correct responses were conducted in research with spoken stimuli and spoken responses (Storkel et al, 2006) which will allow comparison in the Discussion
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