This study investigated the effects of an increase in the level of acoustic stress (signal-to-noise ratio) on the retrieval of message sets of 2, 3, or 4 unrelated words presented successively. The results indicated that noise degradation did indeed affect the efficiency with which Ss retrieve sequences of successively presented items. It was noticed that the retention of the initial item of a message set caused a marked decrement in the retention and retrieval of subsequent items of the message set and that the effect increased as a function of the number of words presented. The effects were attributed to proactive inhibition, recency, and limited-channel capacity.
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