Simultaneous Acoustic and Semantic Coding in Short-term Memory

Abstract

IT has been suggested1,2 that memory for verbal material comprises two components, one of which is labile and depends on the acoustic properties of the words while the other, which is more durable, is based on their meaning. The observed relationship between rate of forgetting and type of coding is explicable in at least the three following ways. (a) Material may pass from a short term store which uses an acoustic code into a long-term semantically coded store. (b) Material may be encoded on input either acoustically, in which case rapid forgetting occurs, or else semantically, in which case forgetting is relatively slow. (c) Material may be encoded both acoustically and semantically on input, in which case immediate recall will show the effects of both methods of encoding, but because the effects of acoustic coding are short lived, delayed recall will show only semantic effects.