ENCODING CONDITIONS AND THE LIST-STRENGTH EFFECT

The list-strength effect occurs when ''strong'' items within a list ar e remembered at the expense of ''weak'' items within that same list. T he results of two experiments showed that variably encoded words were remembered better than words repeated with the same encoding context, whether memory was measured by free recall, frequency estimates, or re cognition d'. However, there was little or no evidence from any of the measures that the variably encoded words were recollected in the mixe d lists at the expense of the similarly encoded words. This pattern he ld even though, in Experiment 2, there was a list-strength effect on f ree recall, when list strength was manipulated by increasing the numbe r of presentations of a word. It was concluded that the free recall re sults could not be accommodated by the model of memory postulated by S hiffrin, Ratcliff, and Clark (1990) to account for the effects of list strength.