Abstract
Experiment I studied short-term memory (STM) for auditorily presented five word sequences as a function of acoustic and semantic similarity. There was a large adverse effect of acoustic similarity on STM (72·5 per cent.) which was significantly greater (p < 0·001) than the small (6·3 per cent.) but reliable effect (p < 0·05) of semantic similarity. Experiment II compared STM for sequences of words which had a similar letter structure (formal similarity) but were pronounced differently, with acoustically similar but formally dissimilar words and with control sequences. There was a significant effect of acoustic but not of formal similarity. Experiment III replicated the acoustic similarity effect found in Experiment I using visual instead of auditory presentation. Again a large and significant effect of acoustic similarity was shown.
Keywords
Similarity (geometry)Word (group theory)Semantic similarityTerm (time)Structural similarityNatural language processingMathematicsSpeech recognitionComputer scienceArtificial intelligencePhysicsImage (mathematics)
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Publication Info
- Year
- 1966
- Type
- article
- Volume
- 18
- Issue
- 4
- Pages
- 362-365
- Citations
- 909
- Access
- Closed
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Cite This
Alan Baddeley
(1966).
Short-term Memory for Word Sequences as a Function of Acoustic, Semantic and Formal Similarity.
Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology
, 18
(4)
, 362-365.
https://doi.org/10.1080/14640746608400055
Identifiers
- DOI
- 10.1080/14640746608400055