Intonation and auditory grouping in immediate serial recall

The concept of auditory buffer storage is supported by evidence from studies of dichotic memory and serial recall tasks. Previously reported studies of modality‐specific grouping effects can also be accommodated within this theoretical framework, with the effects of stimulus grouping attributed to more effective utilization of the buffer. In this study, the representation of structured sequences in the auditory buffer was further explored in five experiments which investigated the extent to which this system can make use of prosodic cues. Experiment 1 demonstrated that the variations in pitch which constitute the intonation pattern of a natural utterance are extremely effective in enhancing memory performance. Experiment 2 demonstrated that the presence of a strong melodic contour is not a sufficient condition for improvement in recall, even when the melodic structure is both familiar and well‐formed. The results of Experiments 3 and 4 suggested that improvements in recall are most likely to occur when abrupt changes in pitch at group boundaries are the most prominent features of the pitch contour. In Experiment 5 the natural pitch contour was simplified to produce a pattern in which the final item in each group was spoken with accented pitch. This structure was found to be as effective as grouping by pauses. These findings are related to perceptual studies of intonation, and implications for theoretical accounts of auditory memory are discussed.