Word-Frequency Effects on Short-Term Memory Tasks: Evidence for a Redintegration Process in Immediate Serial Recall

Four experiments investigated the mechanisms responsible for the advantage enjoyed by high-frequency words in short-term memory tasks. Experiment 1 demonstrated effects of word frequency on memory span that were independent of differences in speech rate. Experiments 2 and 3 showed that word frequency has an increasing effect on serial recall across serial positions, but Experiment 4 showed that this effect was abolished for backward recall. A model that includes a redintegration process that operates to "clean up" decayed short-term memory traces is proposed, and the multinomial processing tree model described by R. Schweickert (1993) is used to provide a quantitative fit to data from Experiments 2, 3, and 4.