Phonological factors in STM: Similarity and the unattended speech effect

Abstract

Immediate memory for sequences of 5,6, 7, or 8 phonologically similar or dissimilar consonants was studied using visual presentation accompanied by silence or continuous speech in an unfamiliar language, Arabic. There were significant effects of list length, phonological similarity, and unattended speech, and significant interactions between similarity and unattended speech and between similarity and list length. The interactions are shown to stem primarily from the absence of a decrement due to phonological similarity at List Length 8. It is suggested that this absence is attributable to a strategy of abandoning phonological coding when performance drops below some minimum level.