Components of conscious awareness in a long‐term modality effect

The advantage in long‐term recognition memory of words vocalized at study over those read silently was investigated by requiring subjects to indicate when recognizing a word whether or not they could consciously recollect its prior occurrence. The advantage for vocalization occurred only for words which subjects indicated were accompanied by recollective experience, and the results were not affected by whether subjects vocalized the test words or read them silently. It is concluded that this modality effect, and possibly other similar ones, originate in episodic memory and not in a procedural or ‘quasimemory’ system. Differences between the present results and those obtained elsewhere using intentional learning instructions are discussed.