Distinctive Serial Recall Effects

Running head: Distinctive Serial Recall Effects

Distinctive Serial Recall Effects

David Pierre Leibovitz, Upal Nath,

Rosie Sedghi and Dean Verger
Carleton University

Submitted April 26, 2006

Distinctive Serial Recall Effects

Abstract
The study of word-length effect concentrated mostly on the accuracy of recalling short
and long words in both pure and mixed lists. Previous studies showed that pure long lists were
much poorly remembered. Hulme et al. (2004) found that word-length effect could be abolished
in mixed lists when the short and long words are alternated. We investigated distinctiveness and
found it to be a salient cue for improved correct recall when the list of words has a single
distinctive transition. Lists contained three short words following by three long words and vice
versa. Surprisingly, in the short-long condition, there was also an improvement in position 3
recall. One of the possible explanations could be the strategic shift of working memory resource.

Distinctive Serial Recall Effects

Distinctive Serial Recall Effects

Family gatherings are a delightful analogy of memory effects. Such as the favourite Grandparent
whose stories about the early years are often well practiced and exciting, whereas the recounting
of the events of the present week are detail filled but rarely as effective, and the memory of the
intervening years can be haphazard and error prone. In list-based memory research this pattern
has been called the primacy-recency effect and follows a classic U shape as in figure 1
(Baddeley, Thomson & Buchanan 1975).
Baddeley et al. (1975) determined that lists made up of short words were better recalled
than lists made up of longer words. This was termed the Word Length Effect. Hulme, Suprenant,
Bireta, Stuart & Neath (2004) found that lists made up of alternating long and short words were
recalled as accurately as the purely short word lists thus abolishing the word length effect.
The Item Effect and Word Effect hypotheses (described shortly) could not explain why
the word length effect was abolished, so Hulme et al. (2004) proposed a new account based on
the concept of distinctiveness and complexity. However, their explanations were wanting for
several reasons. Firstly, distinctiveness and complexity were loosely defined. Secondly, and
more importantly, the alternating length lists had at least 5 distinctive length transitions that
made studying the time course and accuracy impact of a single distinctive transition impossible.
Moreover, how distinct (and complex) is a regular pattern of transitions? Their conclusion was
about distinctiveness, yet their manipulations confounded the issue.
Saliency, Attention, Processing
It is often surmised that the salience (or distinction) of an item would increase associated
processing or rehearsal. For example, Dunlosky, Hunt & Clark (2000) investigated saliency and
rehearsal of isolates and did not find that they covaried. Nevertheless, it is often assumed that

Distinctive Serial Recall Effects

saliency, processing, activation levels, and attention, are all different facets that explain the same
effect.
List Effect
Baddeley, Thomson & Buchanan (1975) theorized that the word list is rehearsed within a
fixed size phonological buffer that is temporally based on word duration and not structurally
based on the number of syllables. All elements that can fit in the buffer suffer similar time based
decay with rehearsal reactivating the associated memories. It would predict that the serial
position curve for an alternating list of short and long words would average out and lie between
that of the pure long word list and the pure short word list curves (figure 1). Unfortunately, the
word list effect was abolished, and an intermediate effect was not seen by Hulme et al. (2004).
List Effect on Accuracy
100

% Correct

80

60

40

SSSSSS
LLLLLL
SLSLSL

20

0
1

Word Position

Figure 1. List effect prediction on accuracy (data for illustrative purposes only)

Word Effect
Neath & Nairne (1995) explained the primacy-recency curve by considering each word
item as a sublist of time based segments that must be assembled based on their features, with

Distinctive Serial Recall Effects

longer segments being less likely to be assembled correctly due to increased interference of
features. If the length of the word item caused the effect, then an alternating list of words curve
should have a sawtooth shape with the short and long items segregated as shown in figure 2. This
too was not seen by Hulme et al. (2004) as the alternating word list was as smooth as the pure
short word list.
It should be pointed out that the item and word accounts differ in another dimension.
Baddeley, Thomson & Buchanans account is based on an activation decay mechanism, while
Neath & Nairnes (1995) account is based on feature interference. These two mechanisms will
become entangled in related theories that follow.
Item Effect on Accuracy
100

% Correct

80

60

40

SSSSSS
LLLLLL
SLSLSL

20

0
1

Word Position

Figure 2. Item effect prediction on accuracy (data for illustrative purposes only)

Lag-Recency Effect
The list and item explanations differ in scope of influence, global or local respectively.
Although salience is an item feature, distinctiveness is a relation between the current and
previous item and this could lead to an inter-item scope effect. The concept of distinctiveness is

Distinctive Serial Recall Effects

often asymmetrical. The second item is considered more distinct than the first because it is only
when processing the second that distinction can be recognized. With rehearsal, of course,
distinction of the first item can be subsequently processed but to a lesser amount overall. Howard
& Kahana (2002) have shown that the conditional probability of picking an item close to the
specifically rehearsed and distinctive item follows the Lag-Recency curve as shown in figure 3.
The previous retroactively interfering items are overall less likely than the following proactively

Conditional Response Probability

interfering items.

Distance From Last Item Recalled

Figure 3. Lag-recency effect

The possible implication to our hypothesis is that if indeed the fourth item is recalled
better, than this could affect the third and fifth items as well.
Retroactive Interference, Patterns and Structural Effects
The Lag-Recency effect shows both proactive and retroactive interference. When dealing
with patterned information, there is yet another account that seems to show all effects combined,
and adds a hierarchical structure effect as well. Our experiment made use of only four patterns of
word lists. Moreover, the pattern of three short words followed by three longs words has
similarities to music where there are strong and weak beats. Palmer (2005) describes how

Distinctive Serial Recall Effects

sequential memory patterns in music can cause the activation levels associated with
rhythmically strong items to be higher than weak items, and how this provides for nonsymmetrical proactive and retroactive accuracy effects. This activation also decays over time
(figure 4) but this decay is dependant on tempo. It is possible that pure lists are analogous to
longer tempos. Within the mixed lists, short words could be considered as strong and would be
positionally more active. This activation could be related to implicitly increased attention and
processing, or related to less interference.

Figure 4. Predictions of memory retrieval strength for past, present and future sequence events
during performance of a melody. Bars indicate amount of memory strength for the different
sequence events at the time at which the circled note is performed. Xs indicate metrical accent
strength (the more Xs, the more accent).

The aim of the present study was to investigate the time course and impact on accuracy
for a single distinctive transition. We used lists of six words where the first three were short and
the last three were long (and vice versa). We hypothesized that the accuracy of the distinctive
fourth word would improve, but how this would affect the accuracy on nearby words was left as
a subject of this investigation.

Distinctive Serial Recall Effects

Method
Hulme et al. (2004), in their study have shown that the effect of world length on recall is
abolished in lists containing alternating long and short words. Neither the standard item-based
nor list-based models adequately explain this finding. Hulme et al. (2004) proposed an
explanation based on item complexity and distinctiveness. The purpose of this experiment was to
investigate these factors separately and in greater detail. Thus, the present study included the
long-short lists (LLLSSS, where L stands for long and S stands for short) and short-long lists
(SSSLLL) of words as well as pure long lists and pure short lists of words. The transition from
short-to-long word and long-to-short words in mixed lists can indicate distinctiveness, which
should improve recall of nearby words but would separate the entire list into two sublists.
Participants
A total of 16 graduate students from Carleton University voluntarily took part in this
study. The experiment was performed in a large classroom with all participants present. The
participants sat at tables set around the perimeter of the room. The participants were able to see
the projector screen. Each participant signed the first page of their answer booklet for
participation in the experiment as per the guidelines and approval from the Carleton University
Ethics Committee for Psychological Research. Of the 16 participants, 14 were male and 2 were
female, and their ages ranged from 24 to 50 years.
Materials
The words used in this experiment came from experiment 1 of Hulme et al. (2004) with
one exception. The original word stoat was deemed to be less familiar due to the cultural
differences and was replaced by the word mink. The list consisted of eight 1-syllable words
(zinc, mink, scroll, math, switch, mumps, school, Greece) and eight 5-syllable words (aluminium,

Distinctive Serial Recall Effects

hippopotamus, periodical, physiology, refrigerator, tuberculosis, university, Yugoslavia). This

list is a subset of the words originally used by Baddeley et al. (1975) in their 6th experiment.
Their original set consisted of five pools of ten words. Each pool contained one word from each
of ten semantic categories. The words in the list were matched individually for frequency and
conceptual category (for example zinc and aluminium) to reduce confound of other factors such
as semantic and frequency of the word.
Stimuli consisted of 40 trials each containing six words drawn randomly from the list of
the words. The trials were divided equally among four list types: 10 lists of six long words (e.g.,
Yugoslavia, hippopotamus, aluminium, periodical, physiology, tuberculosis), 10 lists of six short
words (e.g., zinc, scroll, mumps, math, mink, switch), 10 lists of three short words followed by
three long words (e.g., scroll, math, zinc, aluminium, physiology, hippopotamus), and 10 lists of
three long words followed by three short words (e.g., tuberculosis, university, aluminium,
mumps, school, Greece).
Procedure
All the words were generated randomly for each type of trials (pure short, pure long,
short-long, and long-short). The experiment was set up using Power Point and the final lists were
entered into the Power Point file. Each list of words was presented visually on a projection
screen, one word at a time using a laptop computer and a projector. Each of the participants was
provided with an answer booklet.
The participants were first shown all the words to be used in the study and their
definitions to ensure a common level of comprehension and familiarity to words. The
experimenter asked the participants to write down the words in their correct order. The first two
trials were practice. At the beginning of each trial, the participants were instructed to turn over to

Distinctive Serial Recall Effects 10

an empty page (they were given 5 seconds for this). After a 1 second delay, each word was
presented for 1 second (with no inter-stimuli delay) and at the end of each trial a question mark
was shown for 30 seconds, while the participants recalled the words by writing them down in
their correct order in their booklet. The participants were also asked to write down a dash in the
appropriate location if they couldnt recall a particular word.
At the end of the experiment, four questions were presented and the participants were
asked to answer each on a separate page. The questions were as follows: 1) What made some of
these word lists easier to memorize? 2) What made some of these word-lists harder to memorize?
3) How did you go about memorizing these lists? 4) Did you use any special techniques or
strategies?

Results
Correct Recall
Correct recall is defined as the correct word recalled in the correct position, correct
order having been the instruction given to the participants in both this experiment, and in Hulme
et al. (2004). Proportion correct recall was the dependent variable used to measure differences
between the four stimulus presentation types as defined in the previous section (pure short, pure
long, short-long, long-short).
A within-participants analysis of variance was performed using list type and word order
(six positions). List type was significant, F(3,45) = 12.40, MSE = .043, p < .001. Participants
recalled fewer words from the pure long list than either the pure short or the mixed lists. As can
be seen in Table 1, proportion correct for pure long was 0.584, while proportion correct for the
pure short was 0.702, a difference of 0.118. This recall difference between pure lists replicates

Distinctive Serial Recall Effects 11

both Hulme et al. (2004), and Baddeley et al. (1975). The two pure lists are shown in figure 6.
Correct recall across the two pure lists for word positions one, two and six are not different. But
the two lists differ from each other on the middle presentations. This difference may be the result
of working memory capacity and word complexity.

Table 1
Proportion of Items Recalled Correctly and Omitted as a Function of List Type
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------List type
Pure short
Pure long
Long-short
Short-long
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Proportion Correct 0.702
0.584
0.726
0.754
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Omission Errors
0.128
0.146
0.093
0.078
Of interest as well are the omission errors, wherein participants responded blank or
indicated in another way that they did not know a given item. As can be seen in table 1 these
errors were larger for the pure lists than the mixed lists.
The effect of word order was also significant, F(5,75) = 11.32, MSE = .063, p < .001.
Recall performance varied with serial position for all four list types. Both pure short and pure
long recall showed classic primacy-recency effects with position one having the highest
proportion correct (primacy). Participants recall declined through the serial presentation, but
improved on the last word in the order (recency) as seen in figure 5. The two mixed presentations
had patterns that differed from those of the pure lists.

Distinctive Serial Recall Effects 12

Word Length Effect
for pure short and pure long words
1.0
0.9

Proportion Correct

0.8
0.7
0.6
0.5
0.4
0.3

pure long
pure short

0.2
one

two

three

four

five

six

Word Position
Figure 5. Mean proportion of words recalled in the correct position as a function of list type and
serial position

There was also a significant List x Order interaction F(15,225) = 5.55, MSE = .019, p <
.001. Both mixed lists (short-long and long-short) acted as if they have been divided into two
separate pure word sublists each with primacy-recency effects (see figures 6 and 7). Participants
did not know until the fourth word whether they were being presented a pure or a mixed list.
When participants were presented with long words first, the results are the same for the first
three words in both pure long and long-short presentations. For word presentation four through
six, the results diverge. Participants recall for the short half of the long-short list improved
significantly compared to the pure long list.

Distinctive Serial Recall Effects 13

Word Length Effect
for pure long and long-short lists
1.0
0.9

Proportion Correct

0.8
0.7
0.6
0.5
0.4
0.3

Pure long
Long-short

0.2
one

two

three

four

five

six

Word Position
Figure 6. Mean proportion of words recalled in the correct position as a function of list type and
serial position

When short words were presented first participants again split the mixed list (short-long)
in two with position three (the end of the short word presentation) and position four (the
beginning of the long words) being significantly different from the corresponding pure short list
(figure 7). Position four recall improvement was expected. What was a surprise was the
significant result and improvement for the third word in this mixed short-long list. This might be
due to distinctiveness. When rehearsing the Participant has a chance to repeat the list and as such
may be able to cue the shorter word by referencing the longer improving both position three and
four recall. Or it might be due to complexity, or rather the ease with which the one syllable word
can be retained compared to the five syllable word.

Distinctive Serial Recall Effects 14

Word Length Effect

for pure short and short-long lists
1.0

Proportion Correct

0.9

0.8

0.7

0.6

0.5

short-long
pure short

0.4
one

two

three

four

five

six

Word Position
Figure 7, Mean proportion of words recalled in the correct position as a function of list type and
serial position

This implies a strategy. In a task to remember as many words as possible in the correct
order the Participant may favour the shorter word over the longer. Position six for pure short,
pure long, and pure short-long were not significantly different (see both figure 5 and 7).
Participants responding to the questions at the end of the experiment wrote that the most
difficult recall was the long word list whereas the easiest were the pure short and mixed. They
had difficulties due to time limits, length of the word, and remembering how to spell the word.
At least five participants did speak English as a second language

Distinctive Serial Recall Effects 15

In reply to which strategies they used, the Participants wrote that they best remembered
rhyming words such as zinc and mink, initial letters such as z or Y, shorter words were easier to
remember, and that many tried to shorten the words in some way, either by shortening the word,
such as refrigerator becoming fridge, or using the first letter only rather than the full word. In
attempting to deal with the time it took to write down their answers some wrote the first letter of
each word then returned to complete the word.
Although answers to questions about how they experienced or approached the experiment
may have been useful, or may simply have been rationalizations after the fact, no analysis was
done to determine if any of these strategies were effective.

Discussion
Hulme et al. (2004) proposed a novel explanation of the word-length effect drawing on
ideas of item complexity and item distinctiveness. They argued that the word-length effect
depends upon the phonological complexity of items and not upon their spoken length per se.
Hulme et al. (2004) argued that in addition to the role of item complexity, how well any given
item in a list can be recalled would depend upon the relative distinctiveness of the item in
relation to other items in the list. In this view, the recall of long items in mixed lists (alternating
short and long items) is boosted by their relatively greater distinctiveness in mixed lists than in
pure lists. When equal numbers of short and long words are presented in the same list the word
length effect is abolished, with both types of words being recalled at levels indistinguishable
from the recall of short words.

Distinctive Serial Recall Effects 16

Figure 6 shows that recall accuracy for both the pure long and short lists were as
expected, replicating the results of Baddeley et al. (1975) and Hulme et al. (2004). It showed
primacy-recency effects and a better percentage correct for short list than long.
Our hypothesis was that the accuracy of the distinctive word would improve as compared
to the other positions. Figure 6 and 7 show that there is a significant improvement in recalling the
item in position four in both mixed lists (short-long and long-short) comparing to pure long and
pure short lists.
Distinctiveness is a possible effect that improves recall. When all of the words are the
same length (syllables), there may be interference due to similarity between the words (Wickens,
Born, & Allen 1963). Another possible explanation for the improvement of recalling the fourth
position in mixed lists could be attributed to the creation of two sublists with primacy and
recency effects, though this might appear counter-intuitive in a rehearsal model with the need to
remember more details. In the long-short condition, the limitation on working memory capacity
may not be reached when shifting from 5-syllable words to 1-syllable words, the three 1-syllable
words requiring fewer resources than a single 5-syllable word.
Omission errors also supported the idea of distinctiveness. It was found that the mixed
lists had fewer omission errors than the pure lists. The similarity of the pure lists gives fewer
landmarks by which to locate a words position. The mixed lists may reduce confusability due to
similarity, or distinction allows focusing on all cues.
However, we were surprised to see that the accuracy of the third word increased as well,
but only before the short-to-long transition event and not for the long-to-short transition (figure
7). One possible explanation could be a strategic shift in attention to short words. In the shortlong condition, the participant, on recognizing the shift, and under the constraint to remember as

Distinctive Serial Recall Effects 17

many words in the correct order as possible, and knowing that short is easier to recall than long,
may redirect resources to the third word in the list. A retroactive (constructive) interference
could be another explanation.
Possible future research would be to investigate distinctiveness by using words of
the same length but changing one feature of the presented words. The feature could be a font or
colour.

Distinctive Serial Recall Effects 18

References
Baddeley, A.D., Thomson N., & Buchanan, M. (1975). Word Length and the Structure of ShortTerm Memory. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behaviour, 14, 575-589.
Dunlosky, J., Hunt, R.R, & Clark, E. (2000) Is Perceptual Salience Needed in Explanations of
the Isolation Effect. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning and Memory
Cognition, 26(3), 649-57.
Howard, M.W. & Kahana, M.J. (2002). A Distributed Representation of Temporal Context.
Journal of Mathematical Psychology, 46(3), 269-299.
Hulme, C., Suprenant, A.M., Bireta, T.J., Stuart, G., & Neath, I. (2004). Abolishing the WordLength Effect. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 30(1), 98-106.
Neath, I. & Nairne, J.S. (1995). Word-length effects in immediate memory: Overwriting trace
decay theory. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 2, 429-441.
Palmer, C. (2005). Sequence Memory in Music Performance. Current Directions in
Psychological Science, 14, 247-250.
Wickens, D. D., Born, D. G., & Allen, C. K. (1963). Proactive inhibition and item similarity in
short-term memory. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 2, 440-445.