Word length and the structure of short-term memory

By Alan Baddeley, Neil Thomson, M. Buchanan. 1975

Subfields: Cognitive Science & Psychology

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Citations in the corpus

The Search for the Phonological Store: From Loop to Convolution (2008, background): “The word-length effect simply refers to the fact that lists of words that take more time to articulate—longer words—are more poorly remembered than words that take less time to articulate (Baddeley et al., 1975).”
How are words stored in memory? Beyond phones and phonemes (2007, background): “It suggests use of something like an auditory (not linguistic) code for speech memory, and suggests they cannot help storing all that information perhaps because their episodic memory retains a detailed auditory description of each utterance heard in the recent past.”
Nonword repetition and word learning: The nature of the relationship (2006, background): “, Baddeley, Thomson, & Buchanan, 1975), phonological similarity (Salame & Baddeley, 1986), and increased stimulus length (Baddeley et al., 1975).”
Body in mind: How gestures empower foreign language learning (2011, background): “However, there is evidence that short words are also kept in memory better in a foreign language (Baddeley, 2003; Baddeley et al., 1975).”
Discrepancy between inner and overt speech: Implications for post-stroke aphasia and normal language processing (2011, background): “The articulatory control process is an active component that allows rehearsal of words—properties of which were initially defined in terms of the word length effect (Baddeley, Thomson, & Buchanan, 1975 ).”
A formal model of capacity limits in working memory (2006, unknown): “Several authors have attributed forgetting from working memory to rapid time-based decay ( Baddeley, Thomson, & Buchanan, 1975; Barrouillet, Bernardin, & Camos, 2004; Page & Norris, 1998; Kieras, Meyer, Mueller, & Seymour, 1999).”
Working memory: looking back and looking forward (2003, background): “Evidence for the role of articulation comes from the word-length effect:immediate memory span declines as word length increases from one to five syllables 24 .”
Inner speech slips exhibit lexical bias, but not the phonemic similarity effect. (2008, background): “Dell, 1978; Levelt, 1989). If so, the lexical bias and phonemic similarity effects will be equally strong in overt and inner speech. Surface-impoverished hypothesis. Inner speech is impoverished at a surface level, having weakened or absent lower-level representations (e.g. featural level). For exam”
Language aptitude and its relationship to instructional effectiveness in second language acquisition (2005, methodology): “It was based on the discovery that visually presented material has to be transferred to the phonological short-term store and that longer words are more difficult to recall because they take longer to articulate during rehearsal (Baddeley et al., 1975).”