Aimee Surprenant | Memorial University of Newfoundland (original) (raw)

Papers by Aimee Surprenant

The American Journal of Psychology, Jan 11, 2011

The word length effect, the finding that words that have fewer syllables are recalled better than... more The word length effect, the finding that words that have fewer syllables are recalled better than otherwise comparable words that have more syllables, is one of the benchmark effects that must be accounted for in any model of serial recall, and simulation models of immediate memory rely heavily on the finding. However, previous research has shown that the effect disappears when participants are asked to recall the items in strict backward order. The present 2 experiments replicate and extend that finding by manipulating the participant's foreknowledge of recall direction (Experiment 1) and by giving the participant repeated practice with one direction by blocking recall direction (Experiment 2). In both experiments, a word length effect obtained with forward but not backward recall. The results are problematic for all models that currently have an a priori explanation for word length effects. The finding can be accounted for but is not predicted by Scale-Independent Memory, Perception, and Learning (SIMPLE), a model in which item and order information are differentially attended to in the 2 recall directions.

The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 2009

Surprenant et al. (2011) report two experiments which examine whether word length effects are obs... more Surprenant et al. (2011) report two experiments which examine whether word length effects are observable with backward serial recall. Additional data and de-tails are reported here. The word length effect refers to the finding that lists of short (i.e., 1 syllable) words are recalled better than otherwise comparable lists of longer (i.e., multisyllabic) words (Bad-deley, Thomson, & Buchanan, 1975).1 Although this effect has been observed with numerous different tests (e.g., forward serial recall, free recall, serial recognition, single item probe recognition, complex span), there are few studies that examine whether the word length effect is observable with back-ward recall. Only two models --the Primacy Model (Page & Norris, 1998, 2003) and the Feature Model (Nairne, 1990; Neath & Nairne, 1995; Neath, 2000) --address both word length and recall direction, and both predict that the word length effect will remain with backward re-call. Bireta et al. (2010) reported an experiment in w...

The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, May 1, 2009

Psychonomic bulletin & review, 2003

The word length effect is the finding that short items are remembered better than long items on i... more The word length effect is the finding that short items are remembered better than long items on immediate serial recall tests. The time-based word length effect refers to this finding when the lists comprise items that vary only in pronunciation time. Three experiments compared recall of three different sets of disyllabic words that differed systematically only in spoken duration. One set showed a word length effect, one set showed no effect of word length, and the third showed a reverse word length effect, with long words recalled better than short. A new fourth set of words was created, and it also failed to yield a time-based word length effect. Because all four experiments used the same methodologyand varied only the stimulus sets, it is argued that the time-based word length effect is not robust and as such poses problems for models based on the phonological loop.

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 2011

The word length effect, the finding that lists of short words are better recalled than lists of l... more The word length effect, the finding that lists of short words are better recalled than lists of long words, has been termed one of the benchmark findings that any theory of immediate memory must account for. Indeed, the effect led directly to the development of working memory and the phonological loop, and it is viewed as the best remaining evidence for time-based decay. However, previous studies investigating this effect have confounded length with orthographic neighborhood size. In the present study, Experiments 1A and 1B revealed typical effects of length when short and long words were equated on all relevant dimensions previously identified in the literature except for neighborhood size. In Experiment 2, consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) words with a large orthographic neighborhood were better recalled than were CVC words with a small orthographic neighborhood. In Experiments 3 and 4, using two different sets of stimuli, we showed that when short (1-syllable) and long (3-syllable) items were equated for neighborhood size, the word length effect disappeared. Experiment 5 replicated this with spoken recall. We suggest that the word length effect may be better explained by the differences in linguistic and lexical properties of short and long words rather than by length per se. These results add to the growing literature showing problems for theories of memory that include decay offset by rehearsal as a central feature.

Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology/Revue canadienne de psychologie expérimentale, 2014

Three memory tasks-Brown-Peterson, complex span, and continual distractor-all alternate presentat... more Three memory tasks-Brown-Peterson, complex span, and continual distractor-all alternate presentation of a to-be-remembered item and a distractor activity, but each task is associated with a different memory system, short-term memory, working memory, and long-term memory, respectively. SIMPLE, a relative local distinctiveness model, has previously been fit to data from both the Brown-Peterson and continual distractor tasks; here we use the same version of the model to fit data from a complex span task. Despite the many differences between the tasks, including unpredictable list length, SIMPLE fit the data well. Because SIMPLE posits a single memory system, these results constitute yet another demonstration that performance on tasks originally thought to tap different memory systems can be explained without invoking multiple memory systems.

The American Journal of Psychology, 2011

The word length effect, the finding that words that have fewer syllables are recalled better than... more The word length effect, the finding that words that have fewer syllables are recalled better than otherwise comparable words that have more syllables, is one of the benchmark effects that must be accounted for in any model of serial recall, and simulation models of immediate memory rely heavily on the finding. However, previous research has shown that the effect disappears when participants are asked to recall the items in strict backward order. The present 2 experiments replicate and extend that finding by manipulating the participant's foreknowledge of recall direction (Experiment 1) and by giving the participant repeated practice with one direction by blocking recall direction (Experiment 2). In both experiments, a word length effect obtained with forward but not backward recall. The results are problematic for all models that currently have an a priori explanation for word length effects. The finding can be accounted for but is not predicted by Scale-Independent Memory, Perception, and Learning (SIMPLE), a model in which item and order information are differentially attended to in the 2 recall directions.

Psychonomic Bulletin Review, Jul 1, 2003

Journal of Phonetics & Audiology, 2016

Frontiers in Psychology, 2015

Communication success under adverse conditions requires efficient and effective recruitment of bo... more Communication success under adverse conditions requires efficient and effective recruitment of both bottom-up (sensori-perceptual) and top-down (cognitive-linguistic) resources to decode the intended auditory-verbal message. Employing these limited capacity resources has been shown to vary across the lifespan, with evidence indicating that younger adults out-perform older adults for both comprehension and memory of the message. This study examined how sources of interference arising from the speaker (message spoken with conversational vs. clear speech technique), the listener (hearing-listening and cognitive-linguistic factors), and the environment (in competing speech babble noise vs. quiet) interact and influence learning and memory performance using more ecologically valid methods than has been done previously. The results suggest that when older adults listened to complex medical prescription instructions with "clear speech," (presented at audible levels through insertion earphones) their learning efficiency, immediate, and delayed memory performance improved relative to their performance when they listened with a normal conversational speech rate (presented at audible levels in sound field). This better learning and memory performance for clear speech listening was maintained even in the presence of speech babble noise. The finding that there was the largest learning-practice effect on 2nd trial performance in the conversational speech when the clear speech listening condition was first is suggestive of greater experience-dependent perceptual learning or adaptation to the speaker's speech and voice pattern in clear speech. This suggests that experience-dependent perceptual learning plays a role in facilitating the language processing and comprehension of a message and subsequent memory encoding.

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 1994

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2001

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2006

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2003

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 1991

Memory Cognition, May 1, 2013

Journal of Memory and Language, Sep 20, 2006

The American Journal of Psychology, Jan 11, 2011

The word length effect, the finding that words that have fewer syllables are recalled better than... more The word length effect, the finding that words that have fewer syllables are recalled better than otherwise comparable words that have more syllables, is one of the benchmark effects that must be accounted for in any model of serial recall, and simulation models of immediate memory rely heavily on the finding. However, previous research has shown that the effect disappears when participants are asked to recall the items in strict backward order. The present 2 experiments replicate and extend that finding by manipulating the participant's foreknowledge of recall direction (Experiment 1) and by giving the participant repeated practice with one direction by blocking recall direction (Experiment 2). In both experiments, a word length effect obtained with forward but not backward recall. The results are problematic for all models that currently have an a priori explanation for word length effects. The finding can be accounted for but is not predicted by Scale-Independent Memory, Perception, and Learning (SIMPLE), a model in which item and order information are differentially attended to in the 2 recall directions.

The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 2009

Surprenant et al. (2011) report two experiments which examine whether word length effects are obs... more Surprenant et al. (2011) report two experiments which examine whether word length effects are observable with backward serial recall. Additional data and de-tails are reported here. The word length effect refers to the finding that lists of short (i.e., 1 syllable) words are recalled better than otherwise comparable lists of longer (i.e., multisyllabic) words (Bad-deley, Thomson, & Buchanan, 1975).1 Although this effect has been observed with numerous different tests (e.g., forward serial recall, free recall, serial recognition, single item probe recognition, complex span), there are few studies that examine whether the word length effect is observable with back-ward recall. Only two models --the Primacy Model (Page & Norris, 1998, 2003) and the Feature Model (Nairne, 1990; Neath & Nairne, 1995; Neath, 2000) --address both word length and recall direction, and both predict that the word length effect will remain with backward re-call. Bireta et al. (2010) reported an experiment in w...

The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, May 1, 2009

Psychonomic bulletin & review, 2003

The word length effect is the finding that short items are remembered better than long items on i... more The word length effect is the finding that short items are remembered better than long items on immediate serial recall tests. The time-based word length effect refers to this finding when the lists comprise items that vary only in pronunciation time. Three experiments compared recall of three different sets of disyllabic words that differed systematically only in spoken duration. One set showed a word length effect, one set showed no effect of word length, and the third showed a reverse word length effect, with long words recalled better than short. A new fourth set of words was created, and it also failed to yield a time-based word length effect. Because all four experiments used the same methodologyand varied only the stimulus sets, it is argued that the time-based word length effect is not robust and as such poses problems for models based on the phonological loop.

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 2011

The word length effect, the finding that lists of short words are better recalled than lists of l... more The word length effect, the finding that lists of short words are better recalled than lists of long words, has been termed one of the benchmark findings that any theory of immediate memory must account for. Indeed, the effect led directly to the development of working memory and the phonological loop, and it is viewed as the best remaining evidence for time-based decay. However, previous studies investigating this effect have confounded length with orthographic neighborhood size. In the present study, Experiments 1A and 1B revealed typical effects of length when short and long words were equated on all relevant dimensions previously identified in the literature except for neighborhood size. In Experiment 2, consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) words with a large orthographic neighborhood were better recalled than were CVC words with a small orthographic neighborhood. In Experiments 3 and 4, using two different sets of stimuli, we showed that when short (1-syllable) and long (3-syllable) items were equated for neighborhood size, the word length effect disappeared. Experiment 5 replicated this with spoken recall. We suggest that the word length effect may be better explained by the differences in linguistic and lexical properties of short and long words rather than by length per se. These results add to the growing literature showing problems for theories of memory that include decay offset by rehearsal as a central feature.

Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology/Revue canadienne de psychologie expérimentale, 2014

Three memory tasks-Brown-Peterson, complex span, and continual distractor-all alternate presentat... more Three memory tasks-Brown-Peterson, complex span, and continual distractor-all alternate presentation of a to-be-remembered item and a distractor activity, but each task is associated with a different memory system, short-term memory, working memory, and long-term memory, respectively. SIMPLE, a relative local distinctiveness model, has previously been fit to data from both the Brown-Peterson and continual distractor tasks; here we use the same version of the model to fit data from a complex span task. Despite the many differences between the tasks, including unpredictable list length, SIMPLE fit the data well. Because SIMPLE posits a single memory system, these results constitute yet another demonstration that performance on tasks originally thought to tap different memory systems can be explained without invoking multiple memory systems.

The American Journal of Psychology, 2011

The word length effect, the finding that words that have fewer syllables are recalled better than... more The word length effect, the finding that words that have fewer syllables are recalled better than otherwise comparable words that have more syllables, is one of the benchmark effects that must be accounted for in any model of serial recall, and simulation models of immediate memory rely heavily on the finding. However, previous research has shown that the effect disappears when participants are asked to recall the items in strict backward order. The present 2 experiments replicate and extend that finding by manipulating the participant's foreknowledge of recall direction (Experiment 1) and by giving the participant repeated practice with one direction by blocking recall direction (Experiment 2). In both experiments, a word length effect obtained with forward but not backward recall. The results are problematic for all models that currently have an a priori explanation for word length effects. The finding can be accounted for but is not predicted by Scale-Independent Memory, Perception, and Learning (SIMPLE), a model in which item and order information are differentially attended to in the 2 recall directions.

Psychonomic Bulletin Review, Jul 1, 2003

Journal of Phonetics & Audiology, 2016

Frontiers in Psychology, 2015

Communication success under adverse conditions requires efficient and effective recruitment of bo... more Communication success under adverse conditions requires efficient and effective recruitment of both bottom-up (sensori-perceptual) and top-down (cognitive-linguistic) resources to decode the intended auditory-verbal message. Employing these limited capacity resources has been shown to vary across the lifespan, with evidence indicating that younger adults out-perform older adults for both comprehension and memory of the message. This study examined how sources of interference arising from the speaker (message spoken with conversational vs. clear speech technique), the listener (hearing-listening and cognitive-linguistic factors), and the environment (in competing speech babble noise vs. quiet) interact and influence learning and memory performance using more ecologically valid methods than has been done previously. The results suggest that when older adults listened to complex medical prescription instructions with "clear speech," (presented at audible levels through insertion earphones) their learning efficiency, immediate, and delayed memory performance improved relative to their performance when they listened with a normal conversational speech rate (presented at audible levels in sound field). This better learning and memory performance for clear speech listening was maintained even in the presence of speech babble noise. The finding that there was the largest learning-practice effect on 2nd trial performance in the conversational speech when the clear speech listening condition was first is suggestive of greater experience-dependent perceptual learning or adaptation to the speaker's speech and voice pattern in clear speech. This suggests that experience-dependent perceptual learning plays a role in facilitating the language processing and comprehension of a message and subsequent memory encoding.

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 1994

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2001

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2006

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2003

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 1991

Memory Cognition, May 1, 2013

Journal of Memory and Language, Sep 20, 2006