Psychology Department, Memorial University of Newfoundland, St. John's, NF, A1B 3X9, Canada.
Mem Cognit. 2011 Oct;39(7):1198-210. doi: 10.3758/s13421-011-0094-z.
Jalbert, Neath, Bireta, and Surprenant (2011) suggested that past demonstrations of the word length effect, the finding that words with fewer syllables are recalled better than words with more syllables, included a confound: The short words had more orthographic neighbors than the long words. The experiments reported here test two predictions that would follow if neighborhood size is a more important factor than word length. In Experiment 1, we found that concurrent articulation removed the effect of neighborhood size, just as it removes the effect of word length. Experiment 2 demonstrated that this pattern is also found with nonwords. For Experiment 3, we factorially manipulated length and neighborhood size, and found only effects of the latter. These results are problematic for any theory of memory that includes decay offset by rehearsal, but they are consistent with accounts that include a redintegrative stage that is susceptible to disruption by noise. The results also confirm the importance of lexical and linguistic factors on memory tasks thought to tap short-term memory.
贾勒特、尼斯、比雷塔和苏普雷南特（2011）提出，过去有关词长效应的研究表明，音节较少的单词比音节较多的单词更容易被回忆起来，这其中存在一个混淆因素：短单词的正字法相邻词比长单词多。这里报告的实验测试了如果邻接大小比单词长度更重要，那么会出现的两个预测。在实验 1 中，我们发现，并发发音消除了邻接大小的影响，就像它消除了单词长度的影响一样。实验 2 证明，这种模式也适用于非词。对于实验 3，我们在因子上操纵长度和邻接大小，只发现了后者的影响。这些结果对任何包括通过复述抵消衰退的记忆理论都是一个问题，但它们与包括易受噪音干扰的再整合阶段的解释是一致的。这些结果还证实了词汇和语言因素对被认为涉及短期记忆的记忆任务的重要性。
