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Serial Recall, Word Frequency, And Mixed Lists: The Influence Of Item Arrangement, Leonie M. Miller, Steven J. Roodenrys

Faculty of Social Sciences - Papers (Archive)

Studies of the effect of word frequency in the serial recall task show that lists of high-frequency words are better recalled than lists of low-frequency words; however, when high- and low-frequency words are alternated within a list, there is no difference in the level of recall for the two types of words, and recall is intermediate between lists of pure frequency. This pattern has been argued to arise from the development of a network of activated long-term representations of list items that support the redintegration of all list items in a nondirectional and nonspecific way. More recently, it has been …