Exploring the Articulatory Loop

A series of five experiments explore the influence of articulatory suppression on immediate memory for auditorily presented items with a view to testing the revised concept of an articulatory loop. Experiments 1, 2 and 3 demonstrate that the phonological similarity effect is not abolished by articulatory suppression, whether this occurs only at input or at both input and recall. Experiments 4 and 5 show that the tendency for long words to be less well remembered than short is abolished by articulatory suppression, even when presentation is auditory, provided suppression occurs during both input and recall. These results are consistent with the concept of a loop comprising a phonological store, which is responsible for the phonological similarity effect, coupled with an articulatory rehearsal process that gives rise to the word length effect.