SEMANTIC CODING VERSUS THE STIMULUS SUFFIX

Abstract

The stimulus suffix effect is investigated when it follows an auditory memory list in which rated meaningfulness was manipulated at the final serial position. A verbal suffix disrupts the terminal list item compared with a noise suffix, but rated meaningfulness affects recall performance significantly despite the presence of a verbal suffix. With ordered recall, there is some evidence that a verbal suffix disrupts items rated low in meaningfulness to a greater extent (Expt. I); this interaction does not show when serial order recall is stipulated (Expt. II). The effect of rated meaningfulness with a verbal stimulus suffix eliminates a model in which information about the final item is retrieved exclusively from precategorical acoustic storage. The paper discusses two propositions about the preliminary stages of acoustic analysis and encoding in the absence of focal attention.