ABSTRACT
Serial recall performance is in¯uenced by the presence in long-term memory of words that sound similar to the word that is to be recalled. It is suggested that this in¯uence occurs when degraded traces are retrieved from shortterm memory (STM) and information in long-term memory is used to reconstruct the missing information. The history of this idea, and supporting evidence, are brie¯y reviewed in this chapter. An account of the reconstruction process is suggested in which the long-term memory in¯uence is an inherent part of the recall process for all items, and how this might explain the in¯uence of similar sounding words in long-term memory is described.
