The pseudoword effect is the finding that pseudowords (i.e., pronounceable nonwords) tend to give rise to more hits and false alarms than words. The familiarity-based account attributes this effect to the fact that pseudowords lack distinctive semantic meanings, which increases the inter-item similarity of pseudowords compared to words and…

Dual-process models differentiate between two bases of memory, recollection and familiarity. It is routinely claimed that deeper, semantic encoding enhances recollection relative to shallow, non-semantic encoding, and that recollection is largely a product of semantic, elaborative rehearsal. The present experiments show that this is not always the…

Thinking about the meaning of studied words (deep processing) enhances memory on typical recognition tests, relative to focusing on perceptual features (shallow processing). One explanation for this levels-of-processing effect is that deep processing leads to the encoding of more distinctive representations (i.e., more unique semantic or…

Participants read lists of words and then made recognition judgments to pairs of words, each of which consisted of a prime word and a test word. At issue was the effect of a semantic relationship between the prime word and the test word on the recognition judgment to the test word. Under standard recognition conditions, semantic priming impeded…

Preschool-age children were hypothesized to use one of two criteria, cue recognition or target generation, to make several linguistic judgments. When deciding whether a word is one they know, for example, some were expected to consider whether they recognized its sound form (cue recognition), whereas others were expected to consider whether a…

Semantic dementia patients make numerous phoneme migration errors in their immediate serial recall of poorly comprehended words. In this study, similar errors were induced in the word recall of healthy participants by presenting unpredictable mixed lists of words and nonwords. This technique revealed that lexicality, word frequency, imageability,…