It's All About That Case

Prior evidence has indicated that the act of producing a word aloud is more effortful than reading a word silently, and this effort is related to the subsequent memory advantage for produced words. In the current study, we further examined the contributions of reading effort to the overall production effect by making silent reading more effortful. To do this, participants studied words that were presented in standard lowercase font format and words that were presented in an aLtErNaTiNg CaSe font format (which should be more effortful to read). Half of the words in each font condition were read aloud, and half were read silently. Participants completed an old/new recognition test. Experiment 1 was conducted online; Experiment 2 was conducted in-lab and recorded reading times at study to confirm that alternating case font slows reading. In both experiments, we found a production effect in recognition that was uninfluenced by font type. We also found that alternating case font selectively increased recollection (but not familiarity) relative to lowercase font. Thus, the additional time to read words in a disfluent font does not appear to interact with memory benefit of producing words aloud.