ABSTRACT
Compelling evidence supports the tendencies of people to describe their sensory experiences to themselves at the time they occur, and then, later, to remember those descriptions rather than the experiences themselves. The suffix effect was thought to reflect the fact that subsequent auditory input could mask the contents of this store, leaving peformance more or less what it would have been without the auditory information in the first place. The speech group of subjects was told that these were degraded versions of a female speaking the first four digits, and given practice until they could reliably press the key corresponding to each item, from a random series, 13 times in a row. The stimuli were musical pitches and the subjects were either selected for extensive musical experience or selected so as to exclude appreciable musical experience. The penetration of language into various domains of human memory controversial.
