Predicting which words get recalled: Measures of free recall, availability, goodness, emotionality, and pronunciability for 925 nouns

Abstract

To investigate the properties that make a word easy to recall, we added to existing norms for 925 nouns measures of availability, goodness, emotionality, pronunciability, and probability of recall in multiple-trial free recall. Availability, imagery, and emotionality were found to be the best predictors of which words were recalled. This result, which is stable across recall data collected in three separate laboratories, argues for the importance of availability as apredictor of recall and questions the role of the correlated variables of word frequency and meaningfulness. Consistent with earlier work on a smaller sample of words, six factors describe the numerous properties of words studied by psychologists. The six factors are composed of variables based on orthography, imagery and meaning, word frequency, recall, emotionality, and goodness.What factors determine whether a particular word will be recalled by a particular subject under a specific set of experimental conditions? Over the history of the study of memory and learning, four separate aspects of the recall task have received attention (Jenkins, 1979): (1) the nature of the material to be learned and the conditions of presentation; (2) the type of response or criterion task used; (3) the activities engaged in by the learner during study and at test, including depth of processing, rehearsal, and mnemonic strategies; and (4) the characteristics of the learner, including general knowledge, skills, and motivation.In the study presented here, we addressed the first aspect of recall tasks, the nature of materials and the conditions of presentation, by trying to predict the probability of recall of individual words when the other three aspects of the recall task were randomized or held constant. Most of our emphasis was on the material itself because here, and in other studies (Rubin, 1980(Rubin, , 1985, presentation effects were minimal.Consider a typical study investigating one or more item variables, such as frequency, concreteness, or age of acquisition. Words are selected to represent different portions of the range of the variables of interest (e. g., high frequency vs. low frequency). The recall performance of subjects learning these words is then compared. For our purposes, this form of experiment has four disadvantages. First, in selecting fixed lists of stimulus items, the researcher must deal with the confounding relationships between the variable(s) under study and other correlated variables. Holding the correlated stimulus variables constant eliminates the confound, but may produce lists of items which are not representative of the variable being studied, or which are confounded in new ways. For example, Paivio, Yuille, and Madigan (1968) noted that varying imagery while holding concreteness constant results in a set of words that varies in emotionality. Second, so many properties of the experimental procedure (e.g., presentation time, modality, etc.) and the subject population are held constant that the generality of the results may be questio...

Mood-congruent free recall bias in anxiety

“…Target items were presented in a different random order to each subject. Target words (see Appendix 1) were taken from Rubin and Friendly's (1986) pool of rated words. These were selected according to the following criteria.…”

Alcoholism and judgments of affective stimuli.

“…The words were chosen on the basis of previous work conducted in our laboratory (Hutner & Oscar-Berman, 1996); they had been selected from a list compiled by Paivio, Yuille, and Madigan (1968). Frequency ratings, abstractness-concreteness ratings, and emotionality and goodness ratings were obtained from this list and from norms compiled by Rubin and Friendly (1986). Eighteen of the 54 words were neutral, 18 had positive valence, and 18 had negative valence.…”

Extensions of the Paivio, Yuille, and Madigan (1968) norms

“…Two measures of availability were included in a factor analysis reported in the results. Rubin and Friendly (1986) reported availability measures for the PYM items from the Kiss, Armstrong, and Milroy (1972) norms (AvlRF). Keenan and Benjafield (1994) determined availability values for the PYM items on the basis of the frequency with which each word was used to define words in the Oxford English Dictionary (AvlKB).…”