SEARCHING FOR WORDS IN LETTER SETS OF VARYING SIZE

48 undergraduates listed all the 4-letter words he could make up from a set of 5-10 different letters. Responses occurred rapidly at 1st and then more slowly as S exhausted his store of words. With 5 letters, S found 80% of his limit of 8 words in less than 5 min., whereas with 10 letters, S took more than 15 min. to find 80% of his limit of 43 words. Results were analyzed in terms of a model that compared the retrieval of information from memory to a search process. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2006 APA, all rights reserved). © 1969 American Psychological Association.