Phonological markedness and short term recall

Abstract

In the short term recall of verbal materials, error responses tend to sound like the correct responses. The notion of phonological markedness makes it possible to examine such errors in a new way. Phonological markedness implies a scale of complexity for speech sounds. On the basis of this scale of complexity, two hypotheses about the recall of nonsense utterances were stated. (1) The more complex sounds should be more difficult to recall under memory-taxing conditions. (2) The erroneous recall of a less marked for a more marked sound should occur more frequently than the converse error. Nonsense utterances of the form CVC and CVCVC were constructed in order to test these predictions. The consonants were the English obstruents /p b t d č ǰ k g f v θ ð s z ʃ Ʒ/, and the vowels were the three tense vowels /i e α/. Random permutations insured balanced distribution of the consonants and vowels. The utterances were recorded in lists of three. Twenty-four naïve listeners heard the lists and attempted to recall them. All responses were spoken aloud and tape recorded. Frequencies of successful and erroneous recall were used to estimate the probabilities of different kinds of responses. Most of the predictions of differentia! ease of recall were strongly supported in the analysis. These results constitute psychological evidence in favor of phonological markedness. The expected differences in the relative frequencies of particular kinds of error, however, were not found.