Am. Surprenant et al., AUDITORY RECENCY IN IMMEDIATE MEMORY, The Quarterly journal of experimental psychology. A, Human experimental psychology, 46(2), 1993, pp. 193-223
Six experiments investigated the locus of the recency effect in immedi
ate serial recall. Previous research has shown much larger recency for
speech as compared to non-speech sounds. We compared two hypotheses:
(1) speech sounds are processed differently from non-speech sounds (e.
g. Liberman & Mattingly, 1985); and (2) speech sounds are more familia
r and more discriminable than non-speech sounds (e.g. Nairne, 1988,199
0). In Experiments 1 and 2 we determined that merely varying the label
given to the sets of stimuli (speech or non-speech) had no effect on
recency or overall recall. We varied the familiarity of the stimuli by
using highly trained musicians as subjects (Experiments 3 and 4) and
by instructing subjects to attend to an unpracticed dimension of speec
h (Experiment 6). Discriminability was manipulated by varying the acou
stic complexity of the stimuli (Experiments 3, 5, and 6) or the pitch
distance between the stimuli (Experiment 4). Although manipulations of
discriminability and familiarity affected overall level of recall gre
atly, in no case did discriminability or familiarity alone significant
ly enhance recency. What seems to make a difference in the occurrence
of convincing recency is whether the items being remembered are undegr
aded speech sounds.