Semantic similarity and immediate serial recall: Is there an effect on all trials

In immediate serial recall, items are better recalled when they are all drawn from the same semantic category. This is usually accounted for by a two-stage retrieval-based framework, in which, at recall, long-term knowledge is used to reconstruct degraded phonological traces. The category shared by list items would serve as an additional retrieval cue restricting the number of recall candidates. Usually, the long-term search set is not defined, …