Four experiments investigated the mechanisms responsible for the advantage enjoyed by high-frequency words in short-term memory tasks. Experiment 1 demonstrated effects of word frequency on memory span that were independent of differences in speech rate. Experiments 2 and 3 showed that word frequency has an increasing effect on serial recall across serial positions, but Experiment 4 showed that this effect was abolished for backward recall. A model that includes a redintegration process that operates to "clean up" decayed short-term memory traces is proposed, and the multinomial processing tree model described by R. Schweickert (1993) is used to provide a quantitative fit to data from Experiments 2, 3, and 4.

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Immediate memory span and maximal articulation rate were assessed for word sets differing in frequency, word-neighborhood size, and average word-neighborhood frequency. Memory span was greater for high- than low-frequency words, greater for words from large than small phonological neighborhoods, and greater for words from high- than low-frequency phonological neighborhoods. Maximal articulation rate was also facilitated by word frequency, phonological-neighborhood size, and neighborhood frequency. In a final study all 3 lexical variables were found to influence the recall outcome for individual words. These effects of phonological-word neighborhood on memory performance suggest that phonological information in long-term memory plays an active role in recall in short-term-memory tasks, and they present a challenge to current theories of short-term memory.

We present an experiment relating memory span for words and non‐words of differing spoken lengths to speech rate. Linear functions related memory span to speech rate for both words and non‐words. Recall of non‐words, however, is substantially worse than for words and this difference is not attributable to differences in speech rate. Familiarizing subjects with the pronunciations of the nonwords increased memory span for them and these improvements in recall were also, at least partially, independent of changes in speech rate. The results are interpreted as evidence for a separable influence of long‐term memory on immediate memory span performance.

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