ABSTRACT

The Hebb repetition effect (Hebb, 1961) is a phenomenon whereby performance on the immediate serial recall of a list of familiar items is seen to improve over unannounced repetitions of a given list. One possible realworld counterpart of this effect is the learning of phonological word-forms that are themselves sequences of familiar items, in this case phonemes or syllables. We discuss this hypothesis with reference to a variety of recent data, and propose a modelling framework, based on the primacy model of immediate serial recall (Page & Norris, 1998), that seeks to identify common underlying mechanisms.