Long-Term Knowledge Effects on Serial Recall of Nonwords Are Not Exclusively Lexical.

Abstract

S. Roodenrys and M. Hinton (2002) reported superior recall for nonwords with large rather than small lexical neighborhoods when constituent biphone frequency was controlled, but comparable recall of high and low biphone frequency nonwords when neighborhood size was controlled, suggesting that long-term knowledge effects on nonword recall are lexically based. We report two experiments in which the same manipulations were made, but with neighborhood size controlled at the level of neighbor type. In Experiment 1, biphone frequency significantly influenced nonword recall when neighborhood size was controlled in this way. In Experiment 2, neighborhood size significantly influenced nonword recall when biphone frequency was controlled. These findings suggest that long-term knowledge contributions to nonword recall are not exclusively lexical but are based instead on both lexical and phonotactic knowledge of a language.