The role of certain acoustic and semantic factors at short and long retention intervals

Abstract

The Brown-Peterson distractor technique was used in three experiments to investigate the influence of vocalization activity on acoustic similarity effects and semantic effects at a short and long retention interval. Experiment I demonstrated that acoustic similarity had its greater influence at a 2.7 sec retention interval, while the effects of meaningfulness were more apparent at 10.8 sec. Experiment II indicated that vocalization activity contributes to the acoustic similarity effects generally involved in short-term recall tasks. If vocalization of visually presented CCCs was prevented, then the influence of acoustic similarity becomes much less apparent at the short retention interval when compared to the voiced conditions. The results of Experiment III suggested that semantic information which is stored in memory becomes apparent at short retention intervals only when the contributions of articulation and echoic memory are eliminated.