Word-length effects in immediate memory: Overwriting trace decay theory
Ian Neath,James S. Nairne +1 more
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TLDR
It is argued that word-length effects do not offer sufficient justification for including time-based decay components in theories of memory, and an extension of Nairne’s (1990) feature model is used.Abstract:
Memory is worse for items that take longer to pronounce, even when the items are equated for frequency, number of syllables, and number of phonemes. Current explanations of the word-length effect rely on a time-based decay process within the articulatory loop structure in working memory. Using an extension of Nairne's (1990) feature model, we demonstrate that the approximately linear relationship between span and pronunciation rate can be observed in a model that does not use the concept of decay. Moreover, the feature model also correctly predicts the effects of modality, phonological similarity, articulatory suppression, and serial position on memory for items of different lengths. We argue that word-length effects do not offer sufficient justification for including time-based decay components in theories of memory.read more
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References
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Concreteness, imagery, and meaningfulness values for 925 nouns
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Attention, similarity, and the identification-categorization relationship.
TL;DR: In this paper, a unified quantitative approach to modeling subjects' identification and categorization of multidimensional perceptual stimuli is proposed and tested, where subjects identify and categorize the same set of perceptually confusable stimuli varying on separable dimensions.
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Word length and the structure of short-term memory
TL;DR: This article explored the hypothesis that immediate memory span is not constant, but varies with the length of the words to be recalled, finding that words of short temporal duration are better recalled than words of long duration.