Word frequency and list composition effects in associative recognition and recall

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Abstract
The effects of list composition and word frequency on cued recall, associative recognition, and item recognition were examined in three experiments. For pure-frequency lists, cued recall and associative recognition show better performance on common high-frequency (HF) words than on rare low-frequency (LF) words. Item recognition, however, shows an advantage for LF words. In mixed lists, consisting of half HF and half LF words, the HF advantage in cued recall disappeared; however, the word frequency effects in item and associative recognition were unchanged. These results are inconsistent with explanations based on differential attention or co-rehearsal of HF and LF words. However, the results are consistent with list strength results which show that recognition is insensitive to strength-based list composition, but that recall is sensitive to list composition.

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