Comparing word fragment completion and cued recall with letter cues

Cued recall with word stems as cues and fragment completion rely on different types of letter cues and also differ in the explicit-implicit nature of the retrieval orientation. Despite these differences, variables effective in one task may be effective in the other because both rely on letter cues. Two variables known to affect cued recall were manipulated: Lexical set size (number of words that fit the letter cue) and meaning set size (number of associates generated to the studied words). Across four experiments, subjects in each task were less likely to recover targets from larger lexical sets. However, meaning set size affected cued recall but not fragment completion. These results indicate that fragment completion and letter-cued recall are based on lexical search but that cued recall also involves a semantic search component. Furthermore, type of retrieval cue had a greater effect than type of retrieval orientation.