AT-LEXICAL, ARTICULATORY INTERFERENCE IN SILENT READING - THE UPSTREAM TONGUE-TWISTER EFFECT

In two experiments, we investigated the interpretation and boundary co nditions of the tongue-twister (TT) effect in silent reading. Previous ly, McCutchen, Bell, France, and Perfetti (1991) observed a TT effect when students made semantic acceptability judgments on sentences, but not when they made lexical decisions on Lists of words. Using similar methodology in Experiment 1, along with two changes (using ''better'' TTs and longer word lists), we observed a TT effect in a lexical decis ion task. In Experiment 2, a memory span task revealed that students r ecalled fewer words from TT lists than from control lists. These resul ts suggest that the basic mechanism of the TT effect may be articulato ry, rather than working-memory, interference that occurs during lexica l access and resurfaces post-lexically inhibiting efforts to maintain the temporal order of several words.