Recency and suffix effects found with auditory presentation and with mouthed visual presentation: They're not the same thing

Abstract

Five experieents investigated recency and suffix effects in a short-term memory recall task with auditory presentation and with visual presentation when subjects silently mouthed the stimuli. It was concluded that recency and suffix effects found with auditory presentation are not mediated by the same mechanisms that mediate those effects found with visual, mouthed presentation. As expected, the typical recency and suffix effects with auditory stimuli were found with lists consisting of syllables that varied in their vowels (such as teek, take, toke) but not with lists that varied in their consonants (such as pape, tape, cape). Much weaker effects were found for mouthed stimuli; moreover, the effects were not affected by the consonant/vowel variable. The recency and suffix effects with auditorily presented stimuli were not dependent on the size of the vocabulary from which the stimuli were drawn. By contrast, the effects with mouthed visually presented stimuli were dependent on vocabulary size.