Word frequency and list composition effects in associative recognition and recall

The effects of list composition and word frequency on cued recall, associative recognition, and item recognition were examined in three experiments. For pure-frequency lists, cued recall and associative recognition show better performance on common high-frequency (HF) words than on rare low-frequency (LF) words. Item recognition, however, shows an advantage for LF words. In mixed lists, consisting of half HF and half LF words, the HF advantage in cued recall disappeared; however, the word frequency effects in item and associative recognition were unchanged. These results are inconsistent with explanations based on differential attention or co-rehearsal of HF and LF words. However, the results are consistent with list strength results which show that recognition is insensitive to strength-based list composition, but that recall is sensitive to list composition.