The word-length effect and disyllabic words

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Experimental Psychology

Background:

• The word-length effect suggests shorter words are recalled better in memory span tasks.
• Previous research often used word sets with uncontrolled differences, potentially confounding results.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the reliable effect of spoken word duration on immediate serial recall of disyllabic words.
• To test whether previous findings of a word-length effect in disyllables were due to uncontrolled item differences.

Main Methods:

• Compared immediate serial recall of long- and short-duration disyllabic words across three experiments.
• Controlled for word frequency, familiarity, phonological similarity, phoneme count, and semantic associations.
• Utilized auditory/visual presentation and spoken/picture-pointing recall measures.

Main Results:

• Experiments 1a and 1b showed better recall for long words.
• Experiments 2a and 2b found no difference in recall between long and short words.
• Experiment 3 replicated a prior finding of better short-word recall, but only with the original word set.

Conclusions:

• There is no consistent advantage for short-duration disyllables in memory span tasks.
• Previous word-length effect findings may stem from accidental item differences, not duration itself.
• The results question theories attributing memory span capacity to item duration or phonological decay rates.