Relating distinctive orthographic and phonological processes to episodic memory performance

Abstract

The concept of distinctiveness suggests that memory for a given item will benefit to the extent to which that item is unique. For example, the von Restorff effect (see, e.g., Wallace, 1965) refers to better memory performance for items that are made "different" from others during encoding (e.g., by underlining them, presenting them in a different color, etc.). In addition, Hunt and Elliott (1980) demonstrated that items with distinctive word forms (e.g., phlegm) were recalled at a higher rate than were items not orthographically distinctive (e.g., primate). More recently, Hirshman and Jackson (1997) reported that words with inconsistent orthographic-to-phonological mappings (e.g., plaid ) were recalled at a higher rate than were words with more consistent orthographic-to-phonological mappings (e.g., plump). In these studies, the unique attributes differentiated particular items from others during encoding, and they may have been reactivated during retrieval to facilitate memory for them.However, as a theoretical construct, distinctiveness can seem to be circular (see Schmidt's, 1991, discussion); it has been addressed both as an empirical phenomenon and as an explanatory tool. That is, distinctive items are remembered well, and items remembered well are considered distinctive. Our view is that models of word recognition can help show what might make one class of items more distinctive than another. Although these models have not been designed to explain memory performance, they provide a useful framework. For example, in the triangle model (e.g., Plaut, McClelland, Seidenberg, & Patterson, 1996), distributed representations for words exist on three levels: (1) orthography, (2) phonology, and (3) semantics. The same grapheme and phoneme units are used to process all words, but each unique word is associated with a unique pattern of activation among the units. Thus tuck, buck, and duck share two of three grapheme and phoneme units, and would likely interfere with each other more than words sharing fewer units. In localist models (e.g., that of Coltheart, Rastle, Perry, Langdon, & Ziegler, 2001), words in the lexicon will be inhibited more by similar words than by dissimilar words. In both the triangle model and localist models, connections exist between orthography and phonology, both of Three experiments examined the role of three distinctive perceptual factors in recognition and recall memory. Using a subject-paced presentation rate, the first two experiments (recognition and recall) examined (1) the number of phonological-to-orthographic neighbors, (2) phonological-to-orthographic consistency, and (3) orthographic-to-phonological consistency. The third experiment (recall) reexamined the number of phonological-to-orthographic neighbors, using an experimenter-paced presentation rate of 2 sec per item. In both recognition and recall memory tasks, the number of phonological-toorthographic neighbors influenced memory performance, whereas the two types of consistency did not. The results indicate that having fewer ph...

Orthographic neighborhood size effects in recognition memory

“…Unlike in the Cortese et al (2004) study, which revealed a significant effect of stimulus type for hits only when hits and false alarms were analyzed separately, the effect of neighborhood size in the present study was significant for both hits [F(1,25) 6.60, MS e 27.77] and false alarms [F(1,25) 4.38, MS e 17.31] when these were analyzed separately. It is important to note that the results of the present study replicate the neighborhood size effect found by Cortese et al and extend it to a different set of stimuli.…”

“…Mapping is considered here because, although it has been shown to facilitate lexical decision (Ziegler & Perry, 1998), the effects of mapping on memory have been less well studied and the findings have often been contradictory (Cortese et al, 2004;Hirshman & Jackson, 1997). Consistency is measured according to the number of spellings that the target word's orthographic rime can be mapped onto.…”

“…One limitation of this definition is that it contains no reference to a word's phonology, which is also an important part of the memory representation. Recently, a more comprehen-sive definition of orthographic neighborhood size that includes phonology has been provided (Cortese, Watson, Wang, & Fugett, 2004;Ziegler & Perry, 1998). According to this definition, a target's orthographic neighborhood size consists of the number of words in the language that have the same orthographic and phonological rime as does a target word (Cortese et al, 2004).…”

“…Recently, a more comprehen-sive definition of orthographic neighborhood size that includes phonology has been provided (Cortese, Watson, Wang, & Fugett, 2004;Ziegler & Perry, 1998). According to this definition, a target's orthographic neighborhood size consists of the number of words in the language that have the same orthographic and phonological rime as does a target word (Cortese et al, 2004). This means that a word's orthographic neighborhood consists of all the words in the language consisting of rimes that are spelled the same and sound the same as the target word.…”

“…For example, the orthographic neighborhood for the word bat would be considered large (high-N ) because it would include a large number of similar words such as mat, tat, cat, and so forth, but the orthographic neighborhood for the word rhyme, on the other hand, would be small (low-N ) because few other words (thyme, for example) would be included. Cortese et al (2004) examined the effects of orthographic distinctiveness as measured by orthographic neighborhood size, using both recognition and recall tasks to investigate the hypothesis that a word is distinct because it has a unique orthographic and phonological representation in memory. The study words were equated for word frequency and word length, and the variables manipulated were orthographic neighborhood size and mapping consistency (whether a word's phonological rime has only one or multiple spellings).…”