UC Santa Cruz

Examining verbal memory recall from a speech production standpoint can greatly contribute to the understanding of both processes. The existence of the segment as the minimal unit of articulation, already shown in the naming task, has important implications for how recall might occur in verbal recall tasks. Specifically, the initial segment of a target response might be retrieved and articulated before the remainder of the word is retrieved, leading to incremental articulation of the target word with the segment as minimal unit of articulation. This possibility was explored in two experiments by examining the initial segment durations of responses during recall when blocks were either heterogeneous or homogeneous with respect to the initial segment. Incremental articulation based on the segment was found to occur during the recall task to a greater degree in homogeneous blocks in both experiments. Experiment 2 showed no strong evidence for a relation between interference and incremental articulation. Additional evidence for the segment as minimal unit of articulation was found, extending this result beyond the naming task. Prior techniques used to explore the time-course of recall, such as interresponse time, must be revised. Through exploring recall using this novel paradigm inspired by speech production research, new methods can be utilized to examine established recall effects such as the phonological similarity effect.