The retrieval of scaled English consonants

Two scales of the perceptual differences among English consonants had been constructed earlier, one from pairs of aural syllables and one from pairs of viewed one-syllable English words. In both instances the pairs of stimuli differed only in the initial consonants. In the present work 276 pairs of syllables were assembled in sets of six. A set was viewed sequentially for 1.5 sec/slide. Then 25 subjects who worked in groups of 4-6 attempted to write one randomly chosen omitted member of each pair on an answer form; another 25 subjects were asked to supply the opposite syllables of each pair. This task was termed "primary memory." Fifty additional subjects repeated the tasks but spent 10 sec counting backward by 3s before trying to recall and write the missing syllables, thus setting up a task of secondary memory. Response forms were scored for right, wrong, and omitted responses. All responses were then compared with each of the scales referred to above, and the mean value for each group of 50 subjects (25 who used the answer form in the ab order + 25 who used the ba order) was computed. The difference between the scores for the two tasks was statistically significant, as was the difference between the scores yielded by the two scales. The "visual" scale appeared to fit the data better than the "aural" scale. The procedures employed and the assumptions that were made yielded results that would not justify an opinion that an error in recall is typically "almost right." However, the data did reflect partial forgetting.