Repetition deafness: Repeated words in computer-compressed speech are difficult to encode and recall

new cognitive phenomenon known as repetition deafness, a difficulty in imme-diate recall of repeated words in com-puter-compressed speech. Sixty-four subjects heard sentences and lists at four speeded rates: 70, 55, 35, and 28 msl phoneme. Each target word in the mate-rials followed a pretarget word that was either identical (repeated-target condi-tion) or different (unrepeated-target con-dition), and targets were harder to recall when repeated than unrepeated. Repeti-tion deafness was rate-limited, occurring only with rapid rates of presentation (55 msl phoneme or less), and decreased in magnitude as structure increased from lists to sentences. Implications for cur-rent theories of repetition deficits are discussed. According to recent literature (e.g., Kan wisher & Potter, 1989), repetition deafness (RD) is a hypothetical phenom-enon that does not occur. What does oc-cur is its visual counterpart, repetition blindness (RB). RB refers to the reduced probability of detecting or recalling a word (or letter) due to prior occurrence of the same word (or letter) in a rapidly presented list or sentence (Bavelier &amp