Role of articulation in auditory and visual short-term memory

Two studies are reported which investigated the role of overt articulatory activity in the processing of visually and auditorily presented material. The results of Experiment I showed that letters which were either heard or articulated could be recalled from short-term memory (STM) while visually presented items, neither articulated nor heard, were recalled close to the chance level. Experiment II was a replication of Experiment I but using both recall and recognition measures and words rather than letters. Words were used so that the retention of the semantic and associative features could be measured. The results again suggested the use of both acoustic and articulatory features in STM while semantic and visual features appeared to play little role in retrieval from STM.