Dissociative effects of phonological vs. semantic associates on recognition memory in the Deese/Roediger–McDermott paradigm

Acta Psychologica 137 (2011) 269–279

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Acta Psychologica

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Dissociative effects of phonological vs. semantic associates on recognition memory inthe Deese/Roediger–McDermott paradigm

Chi-Shing Tse a,⁎, Yongna Li b, W. Trammell Neill c

a The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, Chinab Renmin University of China, Beijing, Chinac University at Albany, State University of New York, Albany, NY, USA

⁎ Corresponding author at: Department of EducatioUniversity of Hong Kong, Shatin, N.T., Hong Kong, Cfax: +852 2603 6921.

E-mail address: [email protected] (C.-S. Tse).1 As orthography has not been differentiated from pho

recognition, we will refer to lists as “phonologically simil& Wallace, 2008, which teased apart the effects of osimilarity on false recall.)

0001-6918/$ – see front matter © 2011 Elsevier B.V. Aldoi:10.1016/j.actpsy.2011.01.013

a b s t r a c t
a r t i c l e i n f o
Article history:Received 31 December 2009Received in revised form 2 December 2010Accepted 31 January 2011Available online 5 March 2011

PsycINFO classification:2343 Learning & Memory

Keywords:False memoryPhonologyRecognition memorySemantic

Using a variation of the Deese/Roediger–McDermott paradigm in four experiments, we examined hit rate,false alarm rate, and memory discriminability (d′) for critical items (e.g., sleep) after their semantic associates(e.g., dream, rest, and awake), phonological associates (e.g., bleep, sheep, and cheap) or unrelated items werestudied. Replicating previous research (e.g., Neely & Tse, 2007), d′ was lower for critical items than for yokedassociates in semantic lists. However, d′was higher for critical items than for yoked associates in phonologicallists, even when the same critical items were used for these two list types. The memory discriminability ofcritical items was enhanced by phonological lists via a larger increase in their hit rates than in their false alarmrates, relative to the same critical items in lists of unrelated words. These findings (a) could not be fullyaccounted for by the activation-based theories proposed in the false memory literature, and (b) may suggestthat the memory discriminabilities of semantic and phonological lists are modulated by two distinctactivation mechanisms.

nal Psychology, The Chinesehina. Tel.: +852 2609 6751;

nology as a contributor to falsear”. (See Ballardini, Yamashita,rthographic and phonological

l rights reserved.

© 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

In the Deese/Roediger–McDermott (DRM) paradigm (Deese,1959a, 1959b; Roediger & McDermott, 1995), participants study alist of words that are all semantically related (e.g., dream, rest, andawake) to a single nonstudied critical item (e.g., sleep) (hereafter asemantic list). The false alarm rate is typically higher for critical itemsthan for other nonstudied list items that are weakly related to criticalitems (e.g., quilt). A similar increase in critical item false alarm rateshas been reportedwhen it is related to a list of phonological associates(e.g., cheap, leap, and steep) (hereafter a phonological list)1 (e.g.,Sommers & Lewis, 1999;Wallace, Stewart, &Malone, 1995;Westbury,Buchanan, & Brown, 2002; see also Zeelenberg, Boot, & Pecher, 2005).To account for this false memory effect, several classes of theory havebeen proposed (see Gallo, 2006, for a review): associative activation(e.g., McEvoy, Nelson, & Komatsu, 1999, Processing Implicit andExplicit Representations; Roediger, Balota, &Watson, 2001, ActivationMonitoring theory), thematic consistency (e.g., Brainerd & Reyna,2005, Fuzzy Trace theory), and feature overlap (e.g., Arndt &Hirshman, 1998, version of MINERVA2). In the current study, we

focus on activation-based theories, although dual-process theories ofrecognitionmemory (e.g., Yonelinas, 2002) are also briefly consideredin the General discussion.

According to a general view of activation-based theories, in thesemantic DRM paradigm the presentation of the associate quiltindirectly activates the representations of its related words, such asthe critical item sleep, through implicit associative responses (Roedigeret al., 2001; Underwood, 1965). The indirect activation accumulates forthe critical item when each of its associates is studied, such that itsactivation could be heightened to a similar level as those of studiedassociates after studying its semantic list. False memories occur for thehighly activated critical item when people fail to discriminate theactivation of the nonstudied critical item from the activation of itsrelated associates in the semantic list. A similar account has beenproposed for the falsememory effect occurring in the phonological DRMparadigm. Following Luce and Pisoni's (1998) Neighborhood ActivationModel of spoken word recognition, Sommers and Lewis (1999) assumethat words are organized based on item similarity (e.g., phonology) inthe mental lexicon. For example, the neighborhood of sleep containsitems like cheap, leap, and steep. Speech sound (or subvocalization ofvisually presented words) produces graded activation of phonologicalneighbors such that those more similar to the input receive relativelystronger activation. Hence, similar to semantic false memory, theactivation of nonstudied critical item could be boosted by the studyof itsphonological neighbors and could in turn, induce false memories whenpeople fail to discriminate the critical item from their related associates.

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270 C.-S. Tse et al. / Acta Psychologica 137 (2011) 269–279

1. Distinct mechanisms for phonological and semantic falsememory effects

Given that the explanations of activation-based theories are verysimilar for phonological and semantic false memory effects, thesetheories would predict that the activationmechanisms underlying theencoding/retrieval process of semantic and phonological lists may bequalitatively the same. Nevertheless, the findings from previousstudies seem to suggest that phonological and semantic false memoryeffects may be driven by two distinct activation mechanisms. Forexample, studies using a remember/know procedure reported thatcritical item false alarms were associated with more rememberjudgments than know judgments in semantic lists (e.g., Gallo, Roberts,& Seamon, 1997; Geraci & McCabe, 2006; Roediger & McDermott,1995; Seamon et al., 2002; see also Dewhurst & Farrand, 2004, for arelated finding when semantic category materials were used).According to Rajaram (1993, see also Tulving, 1985), participantsgive (a) remember judgments when a test item triggers some specificrecollection of something that they thought of when it appeared in thestudy list or (b) know judgments when the test item does not triggeranything that they thought of when it appeared in the study list, yet itseems highly familiar. In these semantic DRM studies participantsreported to have illusory recollection for nonstudied critical itemsbecause they misattribute features from studied items to a relatednonstudied item (Gallo & Roediger, 2003), or rely on memory ofsurrounding study items to make their remember/know judgments(Geraci & McCabe, 2006). Contrary to semantic lists, critical item falsealarms are associated with more know judgments than rememberjudgments in phonological lists (e.g., Schacter, Verfaellie, & Anes,1997; Wallace, Malone, & Spoo, 2000). To explain the contrast inremember/know findings between phonological and semantic lists,Ballou and Sommers (2008) suggested that the activation of semanticassociates directs attention to the conceptual relations amongassociates, produces more vivid memories of the nonstudied criticalitems, and in turn triggers more remember judgments. For phono-logical lists, the activation of phonological associates producesshallower levels of processing on surface features, leads to less vividmemories, and in turn triggers more know judgments. Consistentwith these remember/know findings, Ballou and Sommers found anull correlation between phonological and semantic false alarm ratesand concluded that phonological and semantic false memory effectsare driven by two distinct activation mechanisms.

2. Distinct mechanisms for memory discriminability ofphonological and semantic lists

Even though the false memory effects generated by phonologicaland semantic lists may be driven by different activation mechanisms,this does not necessarily mean that the memory discriminability ofsemantic and phonological lists are also modulated by two distinctactivation mechanisms. To test this, one need to examine whetherstudying semantic or phonological list could have different effects onsubsequent abilities to discriminate nonstudied vs. studied criticalitems and list items. To compute the memory discriminability (asquantified by d′ in the current study), one needs to take into accountboth hit and false alarm rates. Note that this does not mean that weregard the false alarm data as uninformative. Even though the focus ofthe current study is memory discriminability, the hit and false alarmdata are still discussed when we explain the current results (see theMnemonic superiority of critical items in phonological lists section in theGeneral discussion). (It is noteworthy that the activation mechanismcould modulate the memory encoding and/or retrieval processes andthen affect the memory discriminability. The current experiments didnot tease apart whether the effect was on encoding or on retrieval.)

As a signal detection measure, memory discriminability has oftenbeen used in previous recognition memory studies (e.g., Heathcote,

2003; Neely & Tse, 2009; Shiffrin, Huber, & Marinelli, 1995; Wixted,2007a; see Wixted, 2007b, for a review). However, only a fewsemantic DRM studies (e.g., McDermott & Roediger, 1998; Miller &Wolford, 1999; Neely, Johnson, Neill, & Hutchison, 1999; Neely & Tse,2007; Westerberg, Steele, & Marsolek, 2008; Westerburg & Marsolek,2003) and a single unpublished phonological DRM study (Neill,Walker, & Houck, 2005) examined the memory discriminability ofcritical items and list items. In some of these studies, the authorscompared d′ for critical items vs. randomly chosen yoked associatesthat are not as related to other list items as the critical items inphonological or semantic lists. They created versions of study lists inwhich the critical item was substituted for the yoked associate so as tomeasure the hits, false alarms, and d′ of both of these items. Due to thedifference in the degree of association to list items for critical items andyoked associates, their d′ difference reflects how the differentialassociative strength of an item with respect to the other list items(i.e., higher for critical items vs. lower for yoked associates) couldinfluence d′. Previous semantic DRM studies reported that d′was lowerfor critical items than for yoked associates (e.g.,Westerburg &Marsolek,2003). This is consistent with the activation-based theories, based onthe assumption that discrimination in recognition memory atretrieval operates similarly to Weber's Law in perception (e.g.,Neely & Tse, 2007; Tussing & Greene, 2001). That is, the study of asemantic associate first activates other semantically related items(including the critical item) and the indirect activation of the criticalitems accumulates as each of its associates is studied. As critical itemsare more closely related to list items than yoked associates, studyinglist items may boost the activation of critical items more than theactivation of yoked associates, independently of whether these itemsare actually studied. The different levels of activation of critical itemsand yoked associates may then affect participants' decisions in thesubsequent recognition memory test. This can be further illustratedby the following example.

To make a correct recognition decision to a test item, participantsneed to discriminate the activation units of studied items vs.nonstudied items. For the sake of argument, let's assume that whenthey study a list of unrelatedwords, the presence or absence of a studyitem produces 4 or 0 activation units, respectively. (The valuesassigned to the activation units of critical items and yoked associatesare for an illustration purpose only, without necessarily reflecting theway that activation units are indeed built up during study presenta-tions.) At test, they judge studied items as studied due to its havingmore activation units and nonstudied items as nonstudied due to itshaving fewer, if not null, activation units. Similarly, in a list ofunrelated words, we assume that the critical item or yoked associateproduces 4 activation units when it is studied and 0 activation unitswhen it is not. In contrast, for a list of related words (e.g., a semanticlist), since critical items are related to all of the other list items butyoked associates are not as strongly related to them, studying theselist items leads to more indirect activation of the critical item (say, 3activation units) than of the yoked associate (say, 1 activation unit).Thus, following the study of a related list, a studied critical itemwouldhave 7 (4 direct+3 indirect) activation units and a nonstudied criticalitem, 3 (indirect) activation units; a studied yoked associate wouldhave 5 (4 direct+1 indirect) activation units and a nonstudied yokedassociate, 1 (indirect) activation unit. At test, byWeber's Law, the 7 vs.3 discrimination for the studied vs. nonstudied critical items would bemore difficult than the 5 vs. 1 discrimination for the studied vs.nonstudied yoked associates. Hence, the critical items would be moredifficult to discriminate than the yoked associates, accounting for theinferior d′ of critical items in previous semantic DRM studies.

If the activation mechanisms underlying the memory discrimina-bility in phonological and semantic lists are distinct, onewould expectthe pattern found in semantic lists (i.e., critical item d′byokedassociate d′) to be different in phonological lists. This result would notbe congruent with activation-based theories, but the evidence for that

271C.-S. Tse et al. / Acta Psychologica 137 (2011) 269–279

was not clear in the only phonological DRM study (Neill et al., 2005)that reported the d′s of critical items and yoked associates. Neill et al.examined the d′s of emotional and neutral critical items and yokedassociates in phonological lists (e.g., tape, rope, rare…). Replicatingother studies (e.g., Pesta, Murphy, & Sanders, 2001), they found (a) alower false alarm rate for the emotional critical items (e.g., rape) thanfor neutral critical items (e.g., park) and (b) a higher d′ for emotionalcritical items (3.23) than for other yoked associates (1.21) and neutralcritical items (1.04). More relevant to the current research, Neill et al.reported that d′ was higher for neutral critical items (1.04) than foryoked associates (.51). Apparently, phonological lists seem to boost d′for critical items, relative to yoked associates, a finding opposite to thepattern shown by semantic lists. However, this d′ difference failed toreach the statistical significance (p=.14). Hence, this finding may notbe strong enough to support the view that the activation mechanismsmodulating the memory discriminability are distinct for phonologicaland semantic lists.

Apart from the large (1.04 vs. .51) yet nonsignificant difference in d′between neutral critical items and their corresponding yokedassociates, there are other concerns in Neill et al. (2005) that maycloud the interpretation of their findings. Because the critical itemsused in their studies were different from those typically used insemantic DRM studies (e.g., Roediger & McDermott, 1995), theirfinding of superior d′ for critical items in phonological lists might haveresulted from the use of different critical items than those used insemantic lists. Also, the inclusion of lists of emotionally chargedwordsmight preclude generalization of their findings to the more usualexperimental paradigmwhich includes neutralwords. To addressNeillet al.'s concerns, we used the exact same critical items for thephonological and semantic lists (and rotated these items acrossparticipants). We also compared the effects of neutral semantic andphonological lists on d′, thus eliminating the complication ofemotionally charged words.

3. Present study

The major goal of the present study is to test the dissociative effectof critical item vs. yoked associate d′ differences for semantic vs.phonological lists by replicating (a) the pattern of inferior d′ forcritical items, compared with yoked associates, in semantic lists (e.g.,Westerburg &Marsolek, 2003) and (b) Neill et al.'s finding of higher d′for critical items, relative to yoked associates, in phonological lists.This dissociative effect may suggest that there are two distinctactivation mechanisms that modulate the memory discriminabilitiesof phonological and semantic lists. The explanation of the activation-based theories may not be sufficient to explain the data ofphonological lists. Apart from the critical item vs. yoked associate d′differences, we compared how studying lists of semantic associates,phonological associates, and unrelated items could affect d′ for theexact same critical items. As elaborated in the General discussion, thiscomparison might shed light on the interpretation of the currentfindings.

To foreshadow our findings, in Experiment 1 we examined d′ forcritical items and yoked associates in phonological lists and showedhigher d′ for critical items than for yoked associates, while replicatingthe finding of a boost of critical item false alarm rate for studied lists,relative to nonstudied lists. (The modifier “nonstudied” here refers tothe lists in which all items were not studied, rather than to the items,e.g., critical items or yoked associates.) In Experiments 2 and 3, weexamined the d′ of critical items in semantic vs. phonological lists bycreating semantic lists for the same critical items, using Nelson,McEvoy, and Schreiber's (2004) association norms. Replicatingprevious studies and Experiment 1, we obtained a dissociative effectof semantic vs. phonological associates on d′ for critical items vs.yoked associates. The critical items yielded higher d′ after theirphonological lists, relative to their semantic lists, were studied.

Finally, in Experiment 4 we compared the effects of phonological vs.unrelated lists on critical items and showed that relative to unrelatedlists, phonological lists indeed enhanced d′ for critical items.

4. Experiment 1

4.1. Method

4.1.1. ParticipantsThirty-six native English speaking undergraduates with normal or

corrected-to-normal vision participated for course credit. They weretested in groups of 2–6 in a quiet computer room, in a session lastingabout 45 min.

4.1.2. MaterialsWe selected 36 10-item phonological lists from previous studies

(e.g., Sommers & Lewis, 1999). From each list, we chose a yokedassociate matched to its respective critical items on word length andorthographic neighborhood size. For each list, a corresponding“critical items studied” list was created by replacing the yokedassociates with the critical items. The critical items or yokedassociates always appeared at the 4th position in the list, with theother words appearing in a fixed, pseudorandom order. (The stimuliare available from the first author by request.) Table 1 displays themean statistics for the lexical characteristics of critical items andyoked associates and other study items on the phonological listsdrawn from Balota et al. (2007). As is usually the case for semanticlists, word frequency was higher for the critical items than for theyoked associates in these phonological lists, t(70)=4.33, Cohen'sd=1.04. To ensure that critical items/yoked associates and list itemswere not related semantically, we computed the list-items-to-critical-item/yoked-associate and critical-item/yoked-associate-to-list-itemsmean summed associative strengths based on the Nelson et al. (2004)free association norms and found both to be virtually zero (b.0001). Tocheck the orthographic/phonological similarity between critical item/yoked associate and list items, we computed the Levenshtein distance(see Yarkoni, Balota, & Yap, 2008) for critical item/yoked associates toeach of their list items. The distance between the two words is theminimum number of substitution, insertion, or deletion operationsrequired to turn one word into the other. The shorter the distance isbetween two words, the more similar they are orthographically. Themean Levenshtein distances were computed by using Yarkoni et al.'sdefault values of the operations and the number of words in the localneighborhood. This measure has been used in previous studies thathave examined the effect of interitem similarity on recognitionmemory (e.g., Freeman, Heathcote, Chalmers, & Hockley, 2010),although it is noteworthy that orthographic and phonologicalsimilarities in English are not completely correlated (see Ballardini,Yamashita, & Wallace, 2008). In our phonological lists, the meanLevenshtein distance was shorter for critical items (1.48) than foryoked associates [2.17, t(35)=7.29, Cohen's d=1.74], suggestingthat the critical items were orthographically more similar to the listitems than the yoked associates.

4.1.3. ProcedurePC-compatible computers running E-Prime were used to display

the study items and collect responses on the recognitionmemory test.The study and test stimuli were presented in white lowercase letterson a black background, centered on the screen. For each participant,12 lists were studied with the yoked associates but not the criticalitems (yoked associate lists), 12 lists were studied with the criticalitems but not the yoked associates (critical item lists), and 12 listswere nonstudied. Assignment of lists to the critical item vs. yokedassociate vs. nonstudied conditions was counterbalanced acrossparticipants. There were two study-test cycles, in each of them, 12out of 24 lists were randomly drawn without replacement to be the

Table 1Lexical characteristics (standard deviation in parentheses) of critical items and phonological-yoked associates in Experiments 1–4, semantic-yoked associates in Experiments 2 and 3and other study items in phonological, semantic, and unrelated lists.

Criticalitem

Phonological-yokedassociate

Semantic-yokedassociate

Other study items in the

Phonological lists Semantic lists Unrelated lists

Word length 4.0 (.8) 4.3 (.7) 4.3 (.8) 4.0 (.8) 5.7 (1.5) 4.0 (.9)Log HAL word frequency 10.7 (1.1) 9.5 (1.2) 9.3 (1.4) 9.4 (2.0) 8.9 (1.7) 9.5 (1.9)Orthographic neighborhood size 10.9 (4.9) 10.2 (6.0) 5.4 (4.9) 10.4 (5.3) 3.4 (4.4) 10.0 (6.8)

Note. All mean values were drawn from Balota et al. (2007).


study lists, so all lists were presented only once for each participant.Within each cycle, participants studied 6 yoked associate listsalternated with 6 critical item lists, followed by a recognitionmemorytest. The participants then studied the remaining 6 yoked associatelists and 6 critical item lists followed by a second recognition memorytest. Each study phase of a cycle began with 6 buffer words and endedwith 6 buffer words, so 132 words (12 lists×10 items+6 primacybuffers+6 recency buffers) in total were studied before a recognitionmemory test.

Study items were presented one at a time, for 3 s, with nointerstimulus interval between two items. There was no break betweenlists, so all 132 words were presented in a steady 6–7 min stream.Immediately following the last study item of a study-test cycle, arecognition memory test was administered. Each test consisted of 40items, including 4 buffer words at the beginning (2 studied, 2nonstudied), followed by 36 test items, which consisted of 6 nonstudiedcritical items from nonstudied lists, 6 nonstudied yoked associates fromnonstudied lists, 6 nonstudied critical items from studied lists, 6nonstudied yoked associates from studied lists, 6 studied critical itemsfrom studied lists, and 6 studied yoked associates from studied lists. Ineachmemory test, presentation order was pseudorandomized such thatthe critical items and yoked associates for each list were separated by atleast 3 items(mean=5.7). Test itemswerepresentedoneat a time, eachremaining in view until participants pressed one of the six number keys(1=sure new, 2=probably new, 3=not sure new, 4=not sure old,5=probably old, 6=sure old). At the end of the first recognition test,participants were allowed to rest before the next study phase began.

4.2. Results and discussion

For purposes of analysis, responses “4”, “5”, or “6” to test itemswere treated as “old” responses. (The overall patterns of findings in allexperiments reported in this paper remained the same when onlyhigh-confidence ratings; that is, only “5” and “6” or only “6”, weretreated as “old” responses.) The mean hit and false alarm rates(proportions of correct and incorrect “old” responses, respectively) areshown in Table 2, along with signal detection measures of memorydiscriminability (d′) and response bias (C). Per a reviewer's request, wealso conducted analyses on the “hit minus false alarm” measure and

Table 2Mean hit rate, false alarm rate, memory discriminability (d′), and criterion (C) (standard devExperiments 1–4.

Experiment Item type Hits

1 (N=36) Critical items (phonological list) .72Critical items (nonstudied list) –

Yoked associates (phonological list) .67Yoked associates (nonstudied list) –

2 and 3 (N=72) Critical items (phonological list) .68Critical items (semantic list) .69Yoked associates (phonological list) .64Yoked associates (semantic list) .68

4 (N=48) Critical items (phonological list) .79Critical Items (unrelated list) .57Yoked associates (phonological list) .67Yoked associates (unrelated list) .62

obtained results similar to thosewe obtained ford′. Thus,we only reportthe d′ analyses for the sake of simplicity. To avoid undefined z-scores forproportions of hits or false alarms of 0 or 1, as recommended bySnodgrass and Corwin (1988), we added .5 to the number of hits (falsealarms) for each condition, added 1 to the total number of responses forthat condition, and divided the former by the latter. For example, if thenumber of hits is 12 out of 12 and the number of false alarms is 0 out of12, the corrected hit rate would be (12+.5)/(12+1) [i.e., .96] and thecorrected false alarm rate will be (0+.5)/(12+1) [i.e., .04], before theyare converted to z-score for d′ computation. This proceduremakes it lesslikely to skew the data than substituting 1 by .99 and 0 by .01. Analysesbased on othermemory discriminability indices (e.g., da) yielded similarpatterns of results. While the interpretation of the changes in Cmay beambiguous when d′ changes (see Neely & Tse, 2007), we report themeans and statistical analyses of Cs for the sake of completeness. Thelevel of statistical significance was pb .05 and only significant effects arereported unless otherwise specified. Marginal significance is defined bythe p values being greater than .05 and smaller than .10, two-tailed. Thepartial eta-square (ηp2) and Cohen's d indicate the effect sizes of F and tstatistics, respectively. As the presentation order of block (1st vs. 2ndblock) didnot interactwith anyvariables for hits, false alarms,d′, orC, allFsb1.01, this factor is not considered any further.

Mean “old” responses (hit and false alarm) for studied lists weresubmitted to a 2 (Item: critical item vs. yoked associate)×2 (ItemStudied Status: studied or nonstudied) repeated-measures ANOVA.Themain effect of Item Studied Statuswas significant, F(1,35)=85.24,MSE=.02, ηp2=.71, reflecting more “old” responses to studied itemsthan to nonstudied items. More important, the Item×Item StudiedStatus interaction was significant, F(1,35)=5.09, MSE=.01, ηp2=.13.The hit rate was higher for critical items than for yoked associates,t(35)=2.43, Cohen's d=.58, whereas the false alarm rates did notdiffer, t(35)=.88, Cohen's d=.21. The d′ was higher for critical itemsthan for yoked associates, t(35)=2.43, Cohen's d=.58. The Cwas notdifferent for critical items and yoked associates, t(35)=1.26, Cohen'sd=.30, indicating that participants used similar response criteria tojudge the critical items and yoked associates. Finally, although the falsealarm rate was not higher for critical items than for yoked associatesfor studied lists, prior studies (e.g., Sommers & Lewis, 1999) havedefined a phonological false memory effect as an increase in false

iation in parentheses) for critical items and yoked associates as a function of list types in

Falsealarms

d′ C

(.12) .48 (.16) .74 (.54) −.31 (.36).34 (.14)

(.10) .51 (.16) .47 (.53) −.24 (.32).37 (.15)

(.17) .41 (.19) .78 (.76) −.13 (.39)(.17) .53 (.22) .49 (.85) −.32 (.45)(.19) .48 (.19) .46 (.64) −.17 (.47)(.16) .36 (.22) .94 (.81) −.04 (.44)(.19) .49 (.19) 1.01 (.79) −.49 (.52)(.22) .35 (.18) .71 (.74) .10 (.54)(.20) .50 (.23) .49 (1.00) −.26 (.42)(.19) .32 (.21) .98 (.97) .11 (.49)


alarms to critical items for studied lists, relative to false alarms tocritical items for nonstudied lists. The present data replicated thateffect for critical items, t(35)=5.16, Cohen's d=1.23, and for yokedassociates, t(35)=5.64, Cohen's d=1.35.

5. Experiments 2 and 3

Is the finding of higher d′ for critical items, relative to yokedassociates, in Experiment 1's phonological lists, which stands incontrast to the reversed pattern reported in semantic studies, aconsequence of the particular critical items we used in thatexperiment? It is possible that the critical items typically used insemantic studies are inherently less memorable than their associates,whereas the critical items used here (selected from previousphonological studies) are inherently more memorable. To addressthis concern, we created semantic lists for the same critical items asfor the phonological lists, compared the d′ for the same critical itemsin both semantic and phonological lists, and in turn, tested thedissociative pattern of d′ differences in critical items and yokedassociation in phonological and semantic lists.

We ran two experiments with different procedures for coordinat-ing the phonological and semantic lists. In Experiment 2, phonologicaland semantic lists were blocked in two separate study-test cycles, 12per cycle. This procedure allowed a more direct replication of theresults of Experiment 1 for phonological lists. At the same time, thisallowed participants to focus on different features (phonological orsemantic) for deciding “old” vs. “new” in separate memory tests. InExperiment 3, phonological and semantic lists were alternated withineach of the three study-test cycles. We expected that this would forceparticipants to rely on similar criteria for assessing the levels ofactivation regardless of list type. Three study-test cycles were used inExperiment 3 to take advantage of all 36 lists (one per critical item)without having participants memorize more than 12 lists for a test. Asit happened, the presentation procedure made little difference to theresults. Unlike in Experiment 1, we did not include nonstudied criticalitems or nonstudied yoked associates from nonstudied lists inExperiments 2 and 3 since we are interested in how the criticalitem d′ is modulated by the list type, but not the critical items' falsealarm difference for the studied vs. nonstudied lists. We expected toreplicate higher d′ for yoked associates, relative to critical items forsemantic lists and higher d′ for critical items, relative to yokedassociates for phonological lists. The results that d′ differences forcritical items and yoked associates were in opposite directions forphonological lists vs. semantic lists suggested that the mechanismsunderlying memory discriminability in phonological and semanticlists would be distinct. This could not be explained by the activation-based theories. Finally, we expected the critical items to yield higher d′when their phonological lists, relative to semantic lists, were studied.

5.1. Method

5.1.1. ParticipantsThirty-six undergraduates from the same participant pool as in

Experiment 1 participated in each of the two experiments.

5.1.2. MaterialsThe phonological lists were the same as in Experiment 1. For each

of the critical items for the 36 phonological lists, we selected the 10highest semantic associates from the Nelson et al. (2004) freeassociation norms. One of the associates in each list was randomlyselected as a semantic yoked associate and used for all participants. Aswas so for phonological lists, the critical itemswere substituted for thesemantic-yoked associates to create corresponding “critical item-studied” lists. The mean list-items-to-critical-item and critical-item-to-list-items associative strength was .13 and .04, respectively, andthe mean list-items-to-yoked-associate and yoked-associate-to-list-

items associative strength was .01 and .04, respectively. The list-items-to-critical-item/yoked-associate associative strength suggeststhat list items were related more strongly to critical items than toyoked associates [.13 vs. .01, t(70)=10.07, Cohen's d=2.41]. As istypical in semantic DRMstudies,we presented the itemsof the semanticlists in a descending order of associative strength. As typically reportedin previous studies using semantic lists, word frequency was higherfor the critical items than the yoked associates in these semantic lists,t(70)=4.59, Cohen's d=1.10. The properties of the semantic-yokedassociates were very similar to the phonological-yoked associates,differing only on orthographic neighborhood size, t(70)=3.65, Cohen'sd=.87 (seeTable 1). ThemeanLevenshteindistanceswerenot differentfor critical items (4.72) and semantic-yoked associates [4.82, t(35)=1.52, Cohen's d=.37], showing that they were equated in theirorthographic/phonological similarity to the list items on semanticlists. More importantly, the critical item vs. semantic-yoked associatedifference in Levenshtein distances (.10) was significantly smallerthan the critical item vs. phonological-yoked associate difference [.69,t(35)=5.31, Cohen's d=1.27].

5.1.3. ProcedureAspects of the procedures not mentioned here were identical to

those of Experiment 1. In Experiment 2, participants received twostudy-test cycles, one consisting of 12 phonological lists followed by arecognition test, the other consisting of 12 semantic lists for differentcritical items, followed by another recognition test. The order ofphonological and semantic study-test cycles was counterbalancedover participants, as was the list type (semantic and phonological) foreach critical item. The presentation order of items within eachsemantic or phonological list was the same for all participants. In thestudy phase of each cycle, 6 lists containing the critical items werealternated with 6 lists containing the yoked associates. The recogni-tion memory test consisted of both critical items and yoked associatesfor every studied list, plus the four primacy buffer items as inExperiment 1. In Experiment 3, participants received three study-testcycles, such that within a cycle, they studied 3 phonological lists withcritical items, 3 phonological lists with phonological-yoked associates,3 semantic lists with critical items, and 3 semantic lists with semantic-yoked associates. These lists were presented in a single pseudoran-dom order, with a constraint that no three consecutive lists were allsemantic or all phonological. Over all three cycles, lists correspondingto all 36 critical items were studied. As in Experiment 2, a recognitionmemory test consisted of critical items and yoked associates for everystudy list, plus the four primacy buffer items.


Because the presentation order of block (i.e., the 1st vs. 2nd blockin Experiment 2 and the 1st–3rd blocks in Experiment 3) did notinteract with any variables for hit rate, false alarm rate, d′, or C, allFsb1.25, this variable is not considered any further. Also, becauseExperiment (2 vs. 3) did not interact with any other variables (allFsb2.73), we reported the analyses based on all 72 participants fromboth experiments. The mean hit and false alarm rates, d′, and C arelisted in Table 2. The mean “old” responses were submitted to a 2(Item)×2 (List: phonological vs. semantic)×2 (Item Studied Status)repeated-measures ANOVA. Mean d′s and Cs were submitted to a 2(Item)×2 (List) repeated-measures ANOVA.

In addition to the expected main effect of Item Studied Status on“old” responses, F(1,70)=164.92,MSE=.04, ηp2=.70, we found amaineffect of Item, F(1,70)=5.40, MSE=.04, ηp2=.07 and a significantItem×List interaction, F(1,70)=12.94, MSE=.03, ηp2=.16, which wasfurther qualified by a significant three-way interaction of Item, List, andItem Studied Status, F(1,70)=25.37, MSE=.02, ηp2=.27. Separateanalyses for phonological and semantic lists both yielded significantItem×Item Studied Status interactions, F(1,70)=8.41, MSE=.02,


ηp2=.11, and F(1,70)=12.83, MSE=.03, ηp2=.16, respectively. How-ever, the patterns of interaction were different. For phonological lists,false alarm rateswere higher for yoked associates than for critical items,t(71)=2.03, Cohen's d=.34, but hit rates did not differ, t(71)=1.43,Cohen's d=.24. In contrast, for semantic lists, false alarm rates werehigher for critical items than for yoked associates, t(71)=4.74, Cohen'sd=.80, while hit rates again did not differ, t(71)=.61, Cohen's d=.10.As a consequence of higher false alarm rates for yoked associates thancritical items in phonological lists, but the reverse for semantic lists, thed′ analysis yielded an Item×List interaction, F(1,70)=24.12,MSE=.44,ηp2=.26. For phonological lists, d′ was higher for critical items than foryoked associates, t(71)=3.00, Cohen's d=.50, replicating Neill et al.(2005) and Experiment 1's results. In contrast, for semantic lists, d′waslower for critical items than for yoked associates, t(71)=3.33, Cohen'sd=.55, replicating previous semantic DRM studies (e.g., Westerburg &Marsolek, 2003). Finally, the analyses of C yielded an Item×Listinteraction, F(1,70)=12.78, MSE=.15, ηp2=.15, with C being thesame for phonological lists, t(71)=.58, Cohen's d=.10, but differentfor semantic lists, t(71)=4.36, Cohen's d=.73. This suggests thatparticipants used the same response criteria to judge the critical itemsand yoked associates for phonological lists, but a more lenient criterionto judge the critical items than the yoked associates for semantic lists,the latter of whichwas in linewith previous studies (e.g., Westerberg &Marsolek). However, it is important to note that the difference inresponse criteria should merely reflect the different criteria placedrelative to where the studied and nonstudied item familiarity distribu-tions intersect, rather than the different absolute criteria placed alongthe familiarity distribution. Thus, the C difference should be interpretedwith cautionwhen there is also a d′difference (seeNeely&Tse, 2007, fora discussion).

In Experiments 2 and 3 we replicated both the findings (criticalitem d′Nyoked associate d′) in Experiment 1 and the pattern (criticalitem d′byoked associate d′) previously reported for semantic lists.Across Experiments 1–3, this d′ difference for phonological lists wasdriven by increased hits for critical items, t(107)=2.33, Cohen'sd=.32, and increased false alarms for yoked associates, t(107)=2.21,Cohen's d=.30. As reported in recognition memory studies usingunrelated words (e.g., Balota & Neely, 1980), high-frequency wordsyield lower hit rates and higher false alarm rates than low-frequencywords. The fact that critical items have higher word frequency thanyoked associates might predict that their hit rates would be lower,rather than higher, than yoked associates, and their false alarm rateswould be higher, rather than lower, than yoked associates. Hence, thecritical item-yoked associate word-frequency difference worksagainst our obtaining the critical item-yoked associate differencesthat we observed in hit rates, false alarm rates, and d′. Nevertheless, toavoid comparing the d′ for two different sets of items, we examinedthe d′s of the exact same critical items for phonological vs. semanticlists and found that d′ was stronger for critical items from phono-logical lists than for critical items from semantic lists, t(71)=2.18,Cohen's d=.37. On the other hand, the d′ was higher for semantic-yoked associates than for phonological-yoked associates, t(71)=5.71,Cohen's d=.96. Because semantic-yoked associates have fewerorthographic neighbors than phonological-yoked associates, theseresults were congruent with Cortese, Watson, Wang, and Fugett's(2004) finding that words with fewer orthographic neighbors yieldbetter recognition memory. In short, since (a) critical items are moreclosely related to other list items than their respective yokedassociates in both semantic and phonological lists, and (b) there is adissociation in critical item vs. yoked associate d′ difference forsemantic and phonological lists, these data suggest that memorydiscriminabilities of phonological and semantic lists are modulated bytwo distinct activation mechanisms.

One could argue that a minor difference in the list structuresbetween phonological and semantic lists could have contributed to thereversal of critical itemvs. yoked associate d′difference for these two list

types. Whereas the items in the phonological lists were presented in afreshly randomized order, those in the semantic lists were presented ina descending order based on the list-items-to-critical-item associativestrength. Westerberg et al. (2008, Experiment 2) reported that usingsemantic lists, the critical item-yoked associate false-alarm differencewas larger when the presentation order was descending (+.32) thanwhen it was ascending (+.05), whereas their hit difference wasvirtually identical when the presentation order was descending vs.ascending (both +.17). Given that Westerberg et al.'s semantic-listresults can be generalized to phonological lists, it is unclearwhether thedifferent patterns of critical item-yoked associate d′ differences that weobtained for our phonological vs. semantic lists were due to theirdifferent nature of association or their different presentation orders.Weaddressed this by conducting an additional experiment in which onlysemantic lists were used. Unlike in Experiments 2 and 3, we nowpresented the items of the semantic lists in a freshly randomized order,thus being parallel with the presentation order of the phonological listsin our other experiments. Forty participants were recruited from thesame sample pool as in the other experiments. All stimuli, design, andprocedures were identical to those in Experiments 2 and 3. The resultwasvery clear:we replicated the typicalfinding that thed′was lower forcritical items (.72) than for yoked associates [1.21, t(39)=4.62, Cohen'sd=1.05]. This effect was due to a false-alarm difference [.49 vs. .34,t(39)=5.40, Cohen's d=1.22], rather than a hit difference [.746 vs..751, t(39)=.25, Cohen's d=.06]. The Cwas−.36 and−.13 for criticalitems and yoked associates, respectively, which was significantly dif-ferent, t(39)=3.64, Cohen's d=.82. After combining these data withthose in Experiments 2 and 3, the Order (randomized vs. descending)did not interact with Item (critical item vs. yoked associate) in C, d′, hitand false alarm rates (all Fsb1). Therefore, the reversal of critical item-yoked associate d′ differences in phonological lists, relative to semanticlists, in Experiments 2 and 3 could not be attributed to the difference inpresentation order for these two list types.

The reversed patterns of critical item-yoked associate d′ differencesin semantic andphonological lists suggested that there are twodistinctactivation mechanisms underlying the memory discriminabilities forsemantic and phonological lists. However, it is not clear if this d′difference could be caused by a suppressive effect of semantic lists or afacilitatory effect of phonological lists (or both). As listed in Table 1, thestudy items (other than critical items and yoked associates) insemantic and phonological lists are different in word length, wordfrequency, and orthographic neighborhood size. One could argue thatit was at least one of these confounds, rather than the overlap inphonological features of study items, that modulated the d′ for criticalitems. As it is impossible to equate all the lexical characteristics forstudy items in phonological vs. semantic lists, in Experiment 4 wetackled this problem by creating lists of unrelated words that matchedall of the lexical characteristics with the study items on thephonological lists and compared the d′ of the same set of criticalitems and yoked associates for phonological and unrelated lists.

Althoughprevious studies using semantic lists have reported a lowerd′ for critical items, relative to yoked associates, there is evidenceshowing that these lists did not actually reduce the d′ for critical items.Neely andTse (2007) comparedd′ for critical itemsandyokedassociatesfor semantic lists to that for critical items and yoked associates that, ifstudied, were presented in lists of unrelated words. Surprisingly, thesame pattern of critical item d′byoked associate d′ was found whetherthe study list consisted of semantic associates or unrelated items.According to activation-based theories, because in unrelated lists bothcritical items and yoked associates are unrelated to the list items, thereshould be 0 indirect activation units for nonstudied critical items andyoked associates, such that in making a recognition decision thereshould be an equivalent 4 vs. 0 studied-item vs. nonstudied-itemdiscrimination for both kinds of items. Hence, the finding that d′ wasbetter for critical items than for yoked associates in a list of unrelateditems suggests that the lower d′ for critical items, relative to yoked


associates, was likely due to their item differences, rather than theirbeing presented with or activated by other semantic associates in thestudy list. Complicating the issue even further, depending on thenumber of semantic associates that are related to the critical item, the d′for critical items and yoked associates from semantic lists could behigher than (8-item) or equal to (14-item) the d′ for critical items andyoked associates from unrelated lists (Neely & Tse).

Given the null or positive effect of semantic lists on d′ for criticalitems, relative to the lists of unrelated words found in Neely and Tse(2007), the difference in d′ of the critical items for phonological andsemantic lists is likely due to a facilitation caused by the phonologicallists. We tested this in Experiment 4 by comparing the d′ for criticalitems and yoked associates for phonological lists to the same criticalitems and yoked associates presented in lists of unrelated wordsmatched on word length, word frequency, and orthographic neigh-borhood size with the study items on phonological lists. As now bothcritical items and yoked associates were identical in both phonologicaland unrelated lists, the differential pattern of critical item-yokedassociate d′ differences in these two list types would no longer beexplained by the difference in yoked associates being used in thesetwo list types. In addition to replicating the positive and negativecritical item-yoked associate d′ differences in phonological andunrelated lists, respectively, we expected that d′ for critical itemswould be better in phonological lists than in unrelated lists.

6. Experiment 4

6.1. Method

6.1.1. ParticipantsForty-eight undergraduates from the same participant pool as in

the previous experiments participated in this experiment.

6.1.2. MaterialsThe phonological lists were the same as in the previous experi-

ments. For each phonological list, we created an unrelated list withthe same critical items or yoked associates but with 9 words that werenot semantically or phonologically related to any of the critical itemsor yoked associates used in the experiment. Either critical items oryoked associates were presented as the 4th words in both list types.Phonological lists and unrelated lists were matched on word length,frequency, and orthographic neighborhood size (see Table 1). Themean Levenshtein distances were shorter for critical items (3.45) thanfor yoked associates [3.60, t(35)=2.32] in the unrelated lists,showing that critical items were orthographically more similar tothe list items than yoked associates on these lists. However, it shouldbe noted that the critical item-yoked associate difference in unrelatedlists (.15) was significantly smaller than the critical item-yokedassociate difference in phonological lists [.69, t(35)=6.74]. Yet giventhat the same sign of the critical item-yoked associate difference inorthographic/phonological similarity for the phonological and unre-lated lists, one would expect that the critical item-yoked associate d′difference would also be in the same direction for phonological andunrelated lists, working against our obtaining a dissociation that wepredicted for the d′ differences in phonological lists vs. unrelated lists.Thus, we do not consider that this Levenshtein-distance differencewould complicate the interpretation of the current findings. All otheraspects of materials were identical to the previous experiments.

6.1.3. ProcedureParticipants received three study-test cycles, such that within a

cycle, they studied 3 phonological lists with critical items, 3phonological lists with yoked associates, 3 unrelated lists with criticalitems, and 3 unrelated lists with yoked associates. Study lists werepresented in a pseudorandom order, with the constraint that no threeconsecutive lists were all phonological or all unrelated. Across all

three cycles, lists corresponding to all 36 critical items were studied.As in Experiments 2 and 3, each recognition memory test consisted ofboth critical items and yoked associates for every list studied in thatcycle, plus four primacy buffer items. Other aspects of the procedurewere the same as those used in the previous experiments.


The mean hit rates, false alarm rates, d′, and C, are displayed inTable 2. Because thepresentation order of block (i.e., the 1st–3rd blocks)did not interact with any variables for hit rates, false alarm rates, d′, or C,all Fsb1.24, this variable is not considered any further. Mean “old”responses were submitted to a 2 (Item)×2 (Item Studied Status)×2(List) repeated-measures ANOVA. Item Studied Status increased “old”responses, F(1,47)=85.87, MSE=.07, ηp2=.65, and phonological listsproduced more “old” responses than unrelated lists, F(1,47)=58.38,MSE=.04, ηp2=.55. Most importantly, we obtained a three-wayinteraction of Item, Item Studied Status and List, F(1,47)=11.10,MSE=.03, ηp2=.19. Follow-up analyses showed significant Item×ItemStudied Status interactions for both phonological lists, F(1,47)=6.27,MSE=.03, ηp2=.12, and unrelated lists, F(1,47)=5.12, MSE=.02,ηp2=.10. For both critical items and yoked associates, false alarm rateswere higher for phonological lists than for unrelated lists, t(47)=3.76,Cohen's d=.78 and t(47)=4.77, Cohen's d=.98, respectively, repli-cating the typical phonological false memory effect reported in theliterature (e.g., Sommers& Lewis, 1999). For critical items, hit rateswerehigher for phonological lists than for unrelated lists, t(47)=5.27,Cohen's d=1.09, but for yoked associates, the difference was smallerand only marginally significant, t(47)=1.80, p=.08, Cohen's d=.37.The2 (Item)×2 (List) repeated-measures ANOVAonmeand′s showed asignificant Item×List interaction, F(1,47)=13.56, MSE=.57, ηp2=.22,showing that critical item d′ was higher than yoked associate d′ inphonological lists, t(47)=3.29, Cohen's d=.68, whereas yoked associ-ate d′ was higher than critical item d′ for unrelated lists, t(47)=2.03,Cohen's d=.42. The yoked associate d′ was lower for phonological liststhan for unrelated lists, t(47)=3.11, Cohen's d=.64, but moreimportantly, critical item d′ was higher for phonological lists than forunrelated lists, t(47)=2.05, Cohen's d=.42. The analysis of C did notyield any Item×List interaction, F(1,47)=2.45,MSE=.22, ηp2=.05. Thecritical item-yoked associate C difference was not significant forunrelated lists, t(47)=.20, Cohen's d=.04. Although it is not clearwhy, unlike in previous experiments, there was now a significant Cdifference between critical items and yoked associates in phonologicallists, t(47)=2.33, Cohen's d=.48. However, as mentioned above, adifference in C should be interpreted with caution when there is also adifference in d′ (see Neely & Tse, 2007, for a discussion).

7. General discussion

Themajor goal of the current experimentswas to test whether thereis a dissociation in critical item vs. yoked associate d′ difference forsemantic and phonological lists, which could suggest that the activationmechanisms underlying the memory discriminability in phonologicaland semantic lists may be distinct. This extends the claim of previousstudies that phonological and semantic false memory effects aremodulated by two distinct mechanisms (e.g., Ballou & Sommers,2008). Using phonological lists selected from previous studies (e.g.,Sommers & Lewis, 1999), in four experiments we found thatphonological lists consistently yielded higher d′ for critical items thanfor yoked associates randomly drawn from the same lists. As quantifiedby Levenshtein distances (see Yarkoni et al., 2008), in phonological lists,yoked associates were less orthographically similar to other study listitems than critical items. Hence, items being more orthographicallysimilar to other list words (i.e., critical items, relative to yokedassociates) led to higher d′. This finding verified the numeric effectreported in Neill et al. (2005), though their lists also contained

2 One could argue that the finding that false alarm rates were not higher for criticalitems than for yoked associates when their phonological lists were studied may beincongruent with previous findings. However, it is noteworthy that the previousstudies did not use the same design as in the current study. They focused on the false-alarm comparison of critical items between studied and nonstudied phonological lists.In Experiments 1 and 4 we did include those conditions and replicated the typicalfinding (i.e., .48 vs. .34 and .49 vs. .35—when nonstudied critical items of unrelatedlists were regarded as nonstudied critical items of nonstudied phonological lists). As aresult, the null false-alarm difference between critical items and yoked associates,when their phonological lists were studied, should not be seen as a failure to replicateprevious findings. In addition, it is important to note some apparent inconsistencies inthe findings of phonological critical item and yoked associate false alarm rates acrossfour experiments. That is, the mean yoked associate minus critical item false alarmdifference was .02 for Experiments 1 and 4 and .07 for Experiments 2 and 3. It is notclear why the inclusion of semantic lists in the study lists in Experiments 2 and 3 couldhave affected the critical item vs. yoked associate false alarm difference. However, itshould be noted that the Experiment (1/4 vs. 2/3)×Item (critical item vs. yokedassociate) interaction on false alarm rates was not significant, F(1,154)=1.29,MSE=.04, ηp2=.01; that is, .02 vs. .07 difference was in fact not significant. [Norwas the .09 vs. .04 difference of yoked associate vs. critical item hit differences inExperiments 1/4 vs. 2/3 significant, F(1,154)=2.75, MSE=.02, η p

2=.02.] Moreresearch should be done to examine the effect of list composition on the hit, falsealarm and memory discriminability for the critical items and yoked associates inphonological and semantic lists.


emotionally charged critical items, but ours contained all emotionallyneutralwords. Using the same set of critical itemsofphonological lists insemantic lists, we replicated the typical findings in semantic DRMstudies (e.g., Westerburg & Marsolek, 2003) that d′ is lower for criticalitems than for yoked associates. Although yoked associateswere not thesame for phonological and semantic lists, the important finding is thecrossover interaction between the type of similarity (phonological vs.semantic) and thedegree of similarity (higher for critical items vs. lowerfor yoked associates). While the explanation derived fromWeber's Lawaccounts for d′ being lower for critical items than for yoked associates insemantic lists, it cannot explain the reverse pattern that occurred inphonological lists. This crossover interaction suggests that the activationmechanisms that modulate d′ for semantic and phonological lists arelikely divergent in nature. Finally, critical items yielded higher d′ in listsof phonological associates than in lists of semantic associates orunrelated words, indicating that the study of a phonological list booststhe d′ of critical items that are phonologically related to the list items. Inthe following sections, we first elaborate on the theoretical implicationsof the current findings for the distinct activation mechanisms thatmodulate memory discriminability of phonological and semantic lists.Second, based on the hit and false alarm patterns of critical items andyoked associates, we postulate an explanation for why phonologicalassociates could boost d′ of critical items, relative to semantic associatesor unrelated words. Third, we briefly consider some dual-processtheories of recognition memory to account for the current findings.Finally, we close by suggesting some future directions for further testingthe memory discriminability of phonological associates.

7.1. Distinct mechanisms for memory discriminability of phonologicaland semantic lists

Assume that (a) the indirect activation from other list items isstronger for critical items than for yoked associates, and (b) whenstudied, the direct activations for critical items and yoked associates arethe same, by Weber's Law (see Neely & Tse, 2007; Tussing & Greene,2001) at retrieval the discrimination for studied vs. nonstudied criticalitems would be more difficult than the discrimination for studied vs.nonstudied yoked associates. Thus, regardless of semantic or phono-logical lists, activation-based theories (e.g., Roediger et al., 2001) couldpredict that studied vs. nonstudied critical itemswould bemore difficultto discriminate than studied vs. nonstudied yoked associates, asreflected by their lower memory discriminability (i.e., d′). The currentresults were not entirely consistent with these predictions. Relative toyoked associates, critical items yielded lower d′ in semantic lists yethigher d′ in phonological lists. Hence, the mechanisms underlying thechange of memory discriminability due to associative strength (i.e.,stronger in critical items vs.weaker in yoked associates) in phonologicaland semantic lists may not be the same. When considering the changesin hit and false alarm rates, relative to unrelated lists, d′ of critical itemsin phonological lists was higher due to the increase in hit rates (22%)being larger than the increase in false alarm rates (14%) (see Table 2).This is in contrast to the patterns of hit and false alarm rates in semanticvs. unrelated lists (cf. Neely & Tse). Again, these results support thatthere may be distinct activation mechanisms underlying memorydiscriminability for semantic and phonological lists, thereby extendingBallou and Sommers' (2008, see also Chan,McDermott,Watson, &Gallo,2005) proposal that semantic and phonological false memories areproduced by two distinct mechanisms. As suggested by Ballou andSommers, the mechanisms underlying the memory discriminability ofphonological and semantic lists could be modulated by (a) a differencein the nature of spreading activation for phonological lists (i.e.,perceptual features like phonemes and articulatory gestures) andsemantic lists (i.e., conceptual features likewordmeaning) at encoding,(b) a difference in participants' ability to discriminate the activation ofsemantic vs. phonological representations at retrieval, or (c) acombination of both (a) and (b). Ballou and Sommers showed that

the mechanisms driving the false memory effects may be different forphonological and semantic lists. By measuring the hit and false alarmrates of the same set of critical items, the current study furtherdemonstrates that the activation mechanisms that modulate thememory discriminability of phonological and semantic lists may alsobe different. This is congruent with the priming literature (e.g., Cronk,2001), which showed an independence of the mechanisms underlyingphonological and semantic priming effects and reflected the extent towhich the phonological and semantic activation are triggered, respec-tively. It is noteworthy that the current study may not tease apartwhether (a) the phonological/semantic activation during encoding,(b) participants' ability to discriminate those activations duringretrieval, or (c) both could contribute to a dissociative effect ofphonological and semantic similarity on memory discriminability.Nevertheless, the current findings could at least support that there arequalitative differences in the activation mechanisms underlying thememory discriminability of phonological and semantic lists. Then, whatexactly is the difference between the semantic and phonologicalactivation mechanisms? We speculate a possible answer for thisquestion based on the findings that memory discriminability of criticalitems was higher in phonological lists than in semantic/unrelated lists.

7.2. Mnemonic superiority of critical items in phonological lists

According to activation-based theories, when a recognition memorydecision is made, the test item is compared to episodic traces inmemoryencoded in the study phase via an overall trace similarity assessment(cf. globalmemorymodel, e.g.,MINERVA inHintzman, 1988). Asmemorytraces of nonstudied critical items are highly similar to those for studiedassociates, these items are susceptible to higher false alarms, relative toother nonstudied yoked associates that are less similar to the studied listitems. This account, which is analogous to theWeber's Law,may accountfor the data of semantic lists, but not for those of phonological lists. InExperiments 2 and 3, the inferior d′ for critical items (relative to yokedassociates) in semantic lists was due to a critical item-yoked associatefalse-alarm difference [.53 vs. .36, t(71)=4.74, Cohen's d=.80], ratherthan a hit difference [.69 vs. .68, t(71)=.61, Cohen's d=.10]. In contrast,averaged across all four experiments the mnemonic superiority forcritical items, relative to yoked associates, in phonological listswas due toa critical item-yoked associate hit difference [.72 vs. .66, t(155)=3.96,Cohen's d=.45] and to a trend of a reversed critical item-yoked associatefalse-alarm difference [.45 vs. .49, t(155)=1.84, p=.07, Cohen'sd=.21].2 This shows that the nature of activation mechanisms may notbe the same for phonological and semantic lists. To account for thepattern of hits and false alarms for phonological lists, one may assume


that the co-occurrence of target features in the same memory trace isweighted more heavily. Most of the study items in a phonological listdiffer from critical items in either initial or final phonemes because theyas phonological exemplars share part (but not all) of the features of“prototype” critical items. The only time all these features occur togetheris when the critical items are actually presented. This configuralinformation of critical items could increase the hit rate and, albeitmarginally, reduce the false alarm rate, and in turn, enhance theirmemory discriminability, relative to the yoked associates, for its presenceon the study list. If a phonological list can be regarded as a category, thecurrent results may be analogous to those reported by Posner and Keele(1968) in their pattern classification task: after participants learned a setof random dot patterns, they were able to classify the prototype betterthan other new patterns within a learned category. This configuralenhancement of critical items for phonological lists hasnot been reportedin any published studies because, to our knowledge, none of thempresented critical items as study items in their phonological lists.3

Why does this configural enhancement not occur for semanticlists? Contrary to the phonological lists, the d′ was lower for criticalitems than for yoked associates in semantic lists, due to their false-alarm difference, rather than their hit difference. It is possible thatunlike in phonological lists where the words overlap mostly in theirorthography/phonology, in semantic lists the features could be muchmore diffusely distributed among the words. The co-occurrence offeatures shared with list items for critical items would not be to thesame extent for semantic lists as for phonological lists and thus, is oflittle help distinguishing whether the critical items were actuallypresented. Note that the above account does not tease apart the role ofactivation mechanisms in memory encoding and retrieval. Forinstance, the activation mechanisms used to process items in thephonological and semantic lists could be identical at encoding but notat retrieval (i.e., item discrimination). Nevertheless, the current dataclearly show that memory encoding and/or retrieval of phonologicaland semantic lists are likely modulated by two distinct activationmechanisms.

7.3. Can dual-process account explain the current findings?

Although the current study focuses on the activation-basedtheories, it is important to consider whether the dual-process theoriesof recognition memory could account for the current findings.According to the account that a recognition decision is made basedon recollection and familiarity (e.g., Yonelinas, 2002), the configuralinformation of prototypes (i.e., critical items) from a phonological listcould facilitate the overt recollection of studied critical items to a

3 The current results may be incongruent with Tehan and Humphreys' (1998)findings. In their short-term cued recall paradigm, participants (a) studied the first 4-word block, (b) were told to forget all those four words, (c) studied a second 4-wordblock (e.g., page, zinc, cat, and witch), and (d) were given a category cue (e.g., animal)to recall a target (i.e., cat) from the second block that is an instance of that category. Inthe first block, on control trials, all nontarget words in both blocks were unrelated tothe target, whereas on interference trials, a semantic foil (dog to the target cat) waspresented as one of the to-be-forgotten filler items (direct interference, e.g., jail, silk,dog, and peach), or its three phonemes distributed across three to-be-forgotten filleritems (distributed interference, e.g., dart, mop, fig, and peach). Relative to the controltrials, participants were more susceptible to proactive interference and recalled thefoils in both direct and distributed interference trials, with the distributed interferenceeffect being stronger than the direct interference effect. This was so whether the threephonemes of the foil were distributed in a same-order sequence (dart, mop, fig, andpeach) or a reordered sequence (fig, dart, peach, and mop). If the direct and distributedinterference effects can be regarded as hits and false alarms, respectively, the currentfindings seem to be inconsistent with Tehan and Humphreys' results because in ourexperiments that involved phonological lists, the hit rates were always higher than thefalse alarm rates for both critical items and yoked associates. However, due to themethodological differences in Tehan and Humphreys and the current experiments,such as their cued recall test preceded by two short (4-item) study lists vs. ourrecognition memory test preceded by multiple 10-item study lists of phonologicalassociates, more research should be done in order to explain the discrepant findingsbetween the two studies.

degree that overcompensates for the overall increase in familiarityindependent of whether the critical item was presented. This processboosts the hit rates and slightly reduces the false alarm rates forcritical items, relative to yoked associates, in phonological lists.Relative to unrelated lists, phonological associates boosted the criticalitems' hit rates to a greater extent than their false alarm rates and thusenhanced the memory discriminability. This is in agreement with ourproposal that memory discriminability of semantic and phonologicallists are modulated by two distinct activation mechanisms. In order touse other dual-process accounts like distinctiveness heuristic (e.g.,Schacter, Israel, & Racine, 1999), recollection rejection (e.g., Brainerd,Reyna, Wright, & Mojardin, 2003), recall-to-reject (e.g., Gallo, Bell,Beier, & Schacter, 2006), and diagnostic/disqualifying monitoring(e.g., Gallo, 2004) to explain the current finding, one may need toincorporate themwithmore assumptions becausemany of them havebeen initially proposed to explain how false recall or recognition couldbe reduced by some manipulations (e.g., pictures, vocalization, andunusual fonts). For example, if phonological information couldenhance memory discriminability via distinctiveness heuristics (orother related strategies), one would expect that relative to unrelatedlists, phonological lists should increase the hit rates and reduce thefalse alarm rates. However, the current study showed that relative tounrelated lists phonological lists indeed yielded higher false alarmsand produced even higher hit rates. This makes it difficult for theserecollection-based monitoring accounts to explain the currentfindings. Nonetheless, because the current research is not designedto test any dual-process theories, more research should be done inorder to give a fair test for these theories.

7.4. Conclusion and future directions

To our knowledge, this is the first study that examines thememorydiscriminability (d′) for critical items and yoked associates in thephonological and semantic DRM paradigms. There are two majorfindings in the current study. First, while d′ was lower for criticalitems than for yoked associates in semantic lists, it was higher forcritical items than for yoked associates in phonological lists, evenwhen the same critical items were used for both types of lists. Second,the d′ for critical items was enhanced by phonological lists, relative towhen the same critical items were used in semantic lists and in lists ofunrelated words. These results show that the activation mechanismsthat modulate memory discriminability may be distinct in phonolog-ical and semantic lists. This extends the work done by Ballou andSommers (2008) who proposed that the phonological and semanticfalse memory effects are driven by two distinct activation mecha-nisms. We propose a configural enhancement account to explain whyphonological associates could boost the d′ for critical items, relative tosemantic associates or words that are unrelated with each other.Given that the current study was exploratory in examining memorydiscriminabilities of semantic and phonological lists, several researchquestions await further investigation.

First, in the current study we quantified phonological similarity byLevenshtein distance that has also been used in other recognitionmemory studies (e.g., Freeman et al., 2010). However, when theorthographic/phonological similarity is quantified by the percentageof identical letters in the same positions (that was different from howour phonological lists were constructed, see Sommers & Lewis, 1999,for more details), Heathcote (2003) reported lower memorydiscriminability for study items when a list of phonological associateswas studied, relative to when a list of unrelated itemswas studied. It isimportant to clarify the differential effects of phonological similaritywhen it is quantified by different indices.

Second, we did not tease apart the effects of orthographic andphonological similarity on d′. This can be done by including a visualsimilarity control condition as inBallardini et al. (2008, seeFootnote1)—the visual features of the list items are moderately similar to the critical


items, yet with reduced rhyme relations (e.g., for a critical item hand,lamp, send, conned, and stash are substituted for phonological associatesof land, sand, canned, and stand). This procedure would clarify theimportant factor (orthographic, phonological, or both) that contributesthe most to the mnemonic superiority of critical items, relative tosemantic or unrelated lists.

Third, critical items and yoked associates may not necessarily be ofthe samedistance on the similarity-to-list-items scale for phonologicallists and for semantic lists, making it difficult to directly compare theireffects on d′. Given the configural enhancement account, phonologicalcritical items should be the highest on the similarity-to-list-items scaleand the semantic yoked associates should be the lowest, with thephonological yoked associates and semantic critical items beingsomewhere in between. The potential nonmonotonic function ofsimilarity to list items could lead to the pattern of a crossoverinteraction on d′ that we found in the current study, withoutnecessarily assuming two distinct mechanisms for semantic andphonological lists. Thus, the current findings might not provideabsolute evidence for memory discriminabilities of phonological andsemantic lists operating via two distinct activation mechanisms.Although there is no currently available measure or norm thatquantifies phonological and semantic similarities on the same scale,in future studies, onemay attempt to quantify these two similarities byusingmultidimensional scaling. By doing so, one could vary the degreeof similarity in more than 2 levels on the same scale within thedimension of semantic vs. phonological similarity in order to testwhether the crossover interaction between the type of similarity(phonological vs. semantic) and the degree of similarity (critical itemvs. yoked associate) could be attributed to the operation of twodistinctactivation mechanisms or a nonmonotonic function of similarity.

Fourth, although we obtained evidence for the two distinctactivation mechanisms that modulate the memory discriminability ofphonological and semantic lists, it is not clear whether and how theyinfluenced encoding and/or retrieval factors and in turn modulated thedissociative effect of studying semantic and phonological lists on criticalitemvs. yoked associate difference inmemorydiscriminability.Onemaymanipulate the factors that modulate the activation of study items. Forexample, one could test if using items that shared less diffused semanticfeatures (e.g., typical exemplars with large featural overlap in anarrowly-defined category) could yield findings similar to thoseobserved for our phonological lists. One could also manipulate theLevenshtein distance between critical items and studied associates inorder to observe the graded change in d′ for critical items, relative to theunrelated lists. On the other hand, the factors that affect the retrievalprocesses could be manipulated. For example, the remember/knowprocedure could be used. If configural enhancement increased the d′ forcritical items of a phonological list via increasing the vivid, subjectiverecollective experience, one would expect a larger proportion ofremember judgments for critical item hits when a phonological list isstudied, relative to when a semantic list or an unrelated list is studied.This expectation seems to be disconfirmed by the larger proportion ofknow judgments for critical item false alarms reported in previousstudies using phonological lists (e.g., Schacter et al., 1997). However,these studies never presented the critical items, so it is not clearwhetherparticipants would also give more know judgments to critical item hits.Also, because these studies did not test both semantic and phonologicallists, they could not compare participants' remember/know judgmentsfor these two list types. Future studies could incorporate the remember/know procedure in the design of Experiments 2 and 3 of the currentstudy in order to shed further light on these issues.

Finally, it is important to acknowledge that the familiarity (oractivation strength) that modulates the memory of semantic lists maynot be directly comparable to the familiarity that modulates thememory of phonological lists. The studies that examine the differ-ences in memory performance in semantic and phonological lists,including the present experiments, have not teased apart whether it is

(a) the difference in memory mechanisms underlying the processingof semantic and phonological lists, or (b) the difference in familiarityinduced or activation triggered by studying phonological vs. semanticlists that gives rise to the different patterns of memory performancefor these two types of lists. Perhaps evidence from neuroimaging onmemory encoding/retrieval of phonological associates vs. semanticassociates could reveal the nature of mnemonic differences forphonologically vs. semantically similar words.

Acknowledgments

Weare indebted to Jeanette Altarriba, Jason Arndt, Steve Dewhurst,Todd Jones, Kathleen McDermott, Jim Neely, William Wallace, and ananonymous reviewer for their constructive comments on the earlierversions of thismanuscript. Portions of these resultswere presented atthe 48th Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society, Long Beach, CA,November 2007. We thank Kristin S. Arditi and Donald J. Moore fortheir assistance with data collection.

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Dissociative effects of phonological vs. semantic associates on recognition memory in the Deese/Roediger–McDermott paradigm