INFORMATION THEORY AND STIMULUS ENCODING IN PAIRED-ASSOCIATE ACQUISITION - ORDINAL POSITION OF FORMAL SIMILARITY

Statistical analyses of English words show that beginning and end letters carry more information than middle letters and that beginning letters carry more than end letters. 2 experiments were performed in which the ordinal position of identical letters within the 3-letter word stimuli of paired-associate lists was varied. Each S acquired a single list in which there were identical letters in only the 1st, middle, or last, or 1st-and-middle, 1st-and-last, and middle-and-last letter positions. A 0-identity condition and a condition with identity in 1st-middle-and-last letter positions were also constructed. Consistent with predictions derived from the informational analyses, difficulty of acquisition varied with the location of information which could be used to discriminate between stimuli and the degree to which the location of this information was incompatible with encoding habits. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2006 APA, all rights reserved). © 1969 American Psychological Association.