Semantic coding and short-term memory

Examined the suggestion that the absence of semantic-similarity effects in most short-term memory studies is due to the difficulty of semantically encoding unrelated words. The effect of semantic similarity on minimal paired-associate learning of semantically compatible (e.g., priest-religious) or incompatible (e.g., priest-delicious) noun-adjective pairs was examined in 56 undergraduates. An adverse effect of similarity was found for compatible but not for incompatible pairs. Serial recall and attempts to distinguish primary and secondary memory components by comparing immediate recall with recall after a 20-sec distractor task were studied in 24 undergraduates. The semantic-similarity decrement again occurred with compatible lists, but only after delay. This result suggests that semantic coding was limited to secondary memory. (15 ref.)