INFORMATION THEORY AND STIMULUS ENCODING IN FREE AND SERIAL RECALL - ORDINAL POSITION OF FORMAL SIMILARITY

Information theory analyses of 3-letter English words show that beginning and end letters carry more information than middle letters and that beginning letters carry more than end letters. There were 14 conditions with 12 Ss in each. Each S acquired a single list of 3-letter words in which there were zero identical letters within a given ordinal position or identical letters in only the 1st, middle, or last or 1st-and-middle, 1st-and-last, or middle-and-last letter positions. 1/2 of the Ss in each of these conditions practiced the list by the method of free recall and 1/2 by the method of serial recall. Ease of free recall increased in the order middle, last, and 1st for single-locus conditions and in the order middle-and-last, 1st-and-middle, and 1st-and-last for dual-locus conditions. This ordering of identity conditions was reversed for serial recall. The direction of this significant Method of Recall * Identity Conditions interaction was interpreted as being consistent with the hypothesis that words are processed on the basis of informational structure. (20 ref.) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2006 APA, all rights reserved). © 1969 American Psychological Association.