The Effects of Associative, Phonological, Semantic, and Linguistic Properties of Words Upon Recall: An Experiment on Verbal Memory

To test what associative, semantic, linguistic, and habitual factors affected verbal recall in long term memory, 37 participants (11 male, 26 female) performed a three part experiment on verbal memory. The first part involved memorising as many words as possible from a list of 59 words presented on-screen. This was followed by an interfering text to read that was either partially relevant or irrelevant to certain words on the recall list. Participants were then presented with a recognition task to test their recollection of the 59 words alongside 60 other distracter words. Reading habits were also briefly evaluated. The text's relevance had no noticeable effect on recall (t(35) = .29, p = .59, d = .18). Self reported reading habits were related to increased recall numerically, but not statistically (r = .2, p = .23). A word's phonological length and concreteness facilitated higher rates of recall, albeit statistically insignificant in interpreting variance in recall (p = .09, p = .11). The single most predictive factor of a word's likelihood of being recalled was it's rarity in the language (β = .56, p < .001). This alongside other results are discussed with relevance to interference theories of memory and forgetting, and relating to the novelty effect with regard to rarity predicting recall. In conclusion measuring a word's frequency of occurrence in a language may be an important measure to include in studies of verbal memory for the aforementioned reasons