Verbal working memory encodes phonological and semantic information differently

Abstract

Working memory (WM) is often tested through immediate serial recall of word lists. Performance in such tasks is negatively influenced by phonological similarity: People more often get the order of words wrong when they are phonologically similar to each other (e.g., cat, fat, mat). This phonological-similarity effect shows that phonology plays an important role for the representation of serial order in these tasks. By contrast, semantic similarity usually does not impact performance negatively. To resolve and understand this discrepan Show more