Word Familiarity and Retention

Abstract

These experiments examine the relationship between subjects' familiarity judgements of words of similar (low) frequency and their recall or recognition of these words. The expected relationship between familiarity and recall was well confirmed, as was the less expected relationship between familiarity and recognition. An analysis of the vocabulary acquisition process led to more specific predictions about performance on delayed, as compared with immediate, retention tests. The most crucial of these predictions was that words which are familiar, but whose meanings are not known, are remembered by tagging sets of phonological (as opposed to semantic) features, leading to good immediate recall but poor delayed recall, and a greater likelihood of acoustic confusions following a delay. Some support was obtained for these predictions. However, subjects showed unexpectedly good retention of unknown words and it was felt that tagging alone does not account for all the findings.