Phonological similarity in working memory span tasks

Michael Chow; Brooke N Macnamara; Andrew R A Conway

doi:10.3758/s13421-016-0609-8

Phonological similarity in working memory span tasks

Mem Cognit. 2016 Aug;44(6):937-49. doi: 10.3758/s13421-016-0609-8.

Authors

Michael Chow¹, Brooke N Macnamara², Andrew R A Conway²

Affiliations

¹ Department of Psychology, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, 08544, USA. machow@princeton.edu.
² Department of Psychology, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, 08544, USA.

PMID: 27048510
DOI: 10.3758/s13421-016-0609-8

Abstract

In a series of four experiments, we explored what conditions are sufficient to produce a phonological similarity facilitation effect in working memory span tasks. By using the same set of memoranda, but differing the secondary-task requirements across experiments, we showed that a phonological similarity facilitation effect is dependent upon the semantic relationship between the memoranda and the secondary-task stimuli, and is robust to changes in the representation, ordering, and pool size of the secondary-task stimuli. These findings are consistent with interference accounts of memory (Brown, Neath, & Chater, Psychological Review, 114, 539-576, 2007; Oberauer, Lewandowsky, Farrell, Jarrold, & Greaves, Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 19, 779-819, 2012), whereby rhyming stimuli provide a form of categorical similarity that allows distractors to be excluded from retrieval at recall.

Keywords: Interference/inhibition; Memory retrieval; Short-term memory; Working memory.

MeSH terms

Adult
Attention / physiology*
Humans
Inhibition, Psychological*
Memory, Short-Term / physiology*
Mental Recall / physiology*
Phonetics*
Young Adult