ABSTRACT
Reading, writing, and spelling, as well as numerous other mental activities, are supported in normally hearing people by phonological codes. One of the best documented domains in which the presence of these codes has been established is short-term memory (STM). Conrad (1962, 1964) has shown that some of the errors in STM experiments are similar to those made when hearing noise. These results have been extended by demonstrations that the memory span depends on phonological similarity between items: the rhyme effect. In the same vein, it has been shown that short words are easier to retain than longer words: the length effect. One of the models of STM proposed to account for these data is a rehearsal device that reactivates the phonological representations of the items to be retained (Baddeley, 1981; Baddeley & Hitch, 1974; Baddeley & Lewis, 1981).
