The phonological similarity effect in immediate recall: Positions of shared phonemes

Earlier literature proposes two ways phonological similarity could harm imm ediate recall: (I) It could increase the degradation of the representations of items in memory, or (2) it could decrease the probability that a degrad ed representation is correctly reconstructed. A multinomial processing tree model for each hypothesis was used to analyze an immediate recall experime nt. Both gave a good account of the data, but, of the two, results favor th e hypothesis that the effect of phonological similarity is to impair recons truction of degraded representations. A second issue is whether positions o f repeated phonemes in phonologically similar items matter. We found that m ere repetition of phonemes produced a phonological similarity effect. Repea ted phonemes in the same positions appeared to produce a greater effect. A final finding is that when reading rate was preequated, phonological simila rity affected memory span by changing the time taken to recall a list of sp an length.