Memorial consequences of generating words and non-words

The present study conceptualizes recall of an item as consisting of two stages: reaching a subgoal of finding a starting feature in the first stage and then attaining the final goal of recovering the to-be-recalled item by finding a subsequent retrieval route. In generating items according to some production rule, the subject is practising finding subsequent retrieval routes leading from initial features to the to-be-remembered items. Therefore, the generation effect can be localized at the second stage. Five experiments manipulated accessibility of initial features and distinctiveness of subsequent retrieval routes. The results explain why it was so difficult to obtain the generation effect for non-words in recent studies and why it can be obtained in some specifiable conditions. The results also explain why the generation effect can be easily obtained with words but sometimes fails to obtain.