School of Psychology, Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK.
Q J Exp Psychol (Hove). 2022 Nov;75(11):2159-2176. doi: 10.1177/17470218221080398. Epub 2022 Mar 9.
Psycholinguistic information plays an important role in verbal short-term memory (vSTM). One such linguistic feature is (ND)-the number of words that can be derived from a given word by changing a single phoneme or single letter-with vSTM performance typically better when word sequences are from dense rather than sparse neighbourhoods. This effect has been attributed to higher levels of supportive activation among dense neighbourhood words. Generally, it has been assumed that lexical variables influence item memory but not order memory, and we show that the typical vSTM advantage for dense neighbourhood words in serial recall is eliminated when using serial recognition. However, we also show that the usual effect of ND is reversed-for both serial recall and serial recognition-when using a subset of those same words. The findings call into question the way in which ND has been incorporated into accounts of vSTM that invoke mutual support from long-term representations on either encoding or retrieval.
心理语言学信息在言语短期记忆（vSTM）中起着重要作用。语言特征之一是（ND）——通过改变单个音素或单个字母，从给定单词中派生的单词数量——当单词序列来自密集而不是稀疏的邻域时，vSTM 性能通常更好。这种效应归因于密集邻域单词之间更高水平的支持性激活。通常，人们认为词汇变量会影响项目记忆，但不会影响顺序记忆，我们表明，在序列回忆中，使用序列识别时，密集邻域单词的典型 vSTM 优势会被消除。然而，我们还表明，当使用相同单词的子集时，ND 的通常效果会发生反转——无论是在序列回忆还是序列识别中。这些发现质疑了将 ND 纳入到 vSTM 解释中的方式，这种解释援引了长期记忆在编码或检索过程中的相互支持。
