Phonemic confusability, precategorical acoustic storage, and the suffix effect

Abstract

Ss attempted ordered recall of acoustically presented strings of seven consonant-vowel syllables. In a control condition, each string was followed by a tone in presentation, while in the experimental (suffix) conditions, a verbal syllable followed the last to-be-remembered item. The independent variable was the phonemic similarity between the verbal suffix and the memory stimuli Although the verbal syllables produced a large suffix effect as compared with the control condition, and although more errors were made overall when similarity was high, the degree to which the verbal suffix items reduced the recency advantage at the end of the series was independent of their phonemic similarity to the stimuli. This independence was taken as support for a distinction between acoustic and articulatory coding.