Does length or neighborhood size cause the word length effect?

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Psycholinguistics
• Memory Research

Background:

• The word length effect suggests shorter words are recalled better than longer words.
• Prior research may be confounded by orthographic neighborhood size, where shorter words have more neighbors.
• This study investigates if neighborhood size is a more critical factor than word length in memory recall.

Purpose of the Study:

• To test predictions that neighborhood size, rather than word length, drives recall.
• To examine the role of concurrent articulation and nonwords in memory tasks.
• To evaluate memory models based on experimental findings.

Main Methods:

• Experiment 1: Assessed recall with concurrent articulation to disrupt phonological encoding.
• Experiment 2: Utilized nonwords to control for lexical effects.
• Experiment 3: Factorially manipulated word length and neighborhood size.

Main Results:

• Concurrent articulation eliminated the effect of neighborhood size, similar to word length.
• The pattern observed with words was replicated using nonwords.
• Factorial manipulation revealed that only neighborhood size significantly affected recall.

Conclusions:

• Memory recall is more influenced by orthographic neighborhood size than word length.
• Findings challenge memory models based on decay and rehearsal.
• Results support memory models incorporating a redintegrative stage vulnerable to noise.
• Lexical and linguistic factors are crucial for tasks presumed to measure short-term memory.