Approximations to English (AE) and short-term memory: Construction or storage?

Abstract

Free recall improves with increasing contextual constraints on verbal material. 3 experiments sought to localize the facilitation at stimulus reception, storage, and/or retrieval. The construction hypothesis assumes associative and grammatical reconstruction of a training list during free recall: a retrieval effect. Exp. I compared retention for high and low AE lists on free recall and on a "successive binary recognition test" which precluded output construction. Result, high AE words are stored more efficiently. Exp. II tested for possibility of input construction during faulty stimulus reception as an alternative explanation to storage. Measurements of perceptual error during training failed to support the input-construction hypothesis. Evidence for output construction was slight but supported a prediction of instructional control of output-construction behavior. Exp. III demonstrated reproducibility and generality of results. Conclusions: (a) the human storage system is biased for high AE material, (b) recognition errors are lawful, false-positive error means are proportional to number of distractors, yielding a .19 constant. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2006 APA, all rights reserved)