Core verbal working-memory capacity: The limit in words retained without covert articulation

Verbal working memory may combine phonological and conceptual units. We disentangle their contributions by extending a prior procedure (Chen Cowan, 2005) in which items recalled from lists of previously seen word singletons and of previously learned word pairs depended on the list length in chunks. Here we show that a constant capacity of about 3 chunks holds across list lengths and list types, provided that covert phonological rehearsal is prevented. What remains is a core verbal working-memory capacity.