WORD-FREQUENCY AND LIST COMPOSITION EFFECTS IN ASSOCIATIVE RECOGNITION AND RECALL

The effects of list composition and word frequency on cued recall, ass ociative recognition, and item recognition were examined in three expe riments. For pure-frequency lists, cued recall and associative recogni tion show better performance on common high-frequency (HF) words than on rare low-frequency (LF) words. Item recognition, however, shows an advantage for LF words. In mixed lists, consisting of half HF and half LF words, the HF advantage in cued recall disappeared; however, the w ord frequency effects in item and associative recognition were unchang ed. These results are inconsistent with explanations based on differen tial attention or co-rehearsal of HF and LF words. However, the result s are consistent with list strength results which show that recognitio n is insensitive to strength-based list composition, but that recall i s sensitive to list composition.