The phonological similarity effect in immediate recall: positions of shared phonemes

Earlier literature proposes two ways phonological similarity could harm immediate recall: (1) It could increase the degradation of the representations of items in memory, or (2) it could decrease the probability that a degraded representation is correctly reconstructed. A multinomial processing tree model for each hypothesis was used to analyze an immediate recall experiment. Both gave a good account of the data, but, of the two, results favor the hypothesis that the effect of phonological similarity is to impair reconstruction of degraded representations. A second issue is whether positions of repeated phonemes in phonologically similar items matter. We found that mere repetition of phonemes produced a phonological similarity effect. Repeated phonemes in the same positions appeared to produce a greater effect. A final finding is that when reading rate was preequated, phonological similarity affected memory span by changing the time taken to recall a list of span length.