Meaningfulness, phonemic similarity, and sensory memory.

Abstract

Three experiments studied the effects of meaningfulness, phonemic similarity, and serial position on sensory memory. Recall was directly related to meaningfulness and inversely related to phonemic similarity. Serial position effects were found when meaningfulness was varied but not when phonemic similarity was manipulated. There was some evidence of chunking when the message length was increased from six to nine letters and 5s were encouraged to group the letters.