Auditory word serial recall benefits from orthographic dissimilarity

The influence of orthographic knowledge has been consistently observed in dissimilarity speech recognition and metaphonological tasks. The present study provides data suggesting that such influence also pervades other cognitive domains phonological related to language abilities, such as verbal working memory. Using serial similarity effect recall of auditory seven-word lists, we observed that inter-item orthographic dissimilarity assists verbal working memory by reducing or even avoiding verbal serial recall the detrimental effect of phonological similarity. However, this orthographic modulation of the phonological similarity effect only occurred at positions four to six of the word list. Performance at position seven benefited from a recency effect that may be assumed to result from a more surface-level (acoustic-phonetic) representation, while better performance at positions one to three is attributable to primacy effects, and can be accounted for in terms of consolidation through recapitulation. The beneficial influence of orthographic knowledge may, therefore, only be apparent when the item stored in short-term memory takes the form of an abstract but unconsolidated phonological representation.