ABSTRACT
Five experiments examined the effects of acoustic similarity and syllabic word length on the rehearsal rate and three memory scanning tasks: scanning for presence, scanning for location, and metered memory search. Acoustic similarity and syllabic word length did not influence the speed of any memory scanning process, but they did slow the rehearsal rate by 15 to 25%. Acoustic similarity and syllabic word length had larger effects on larger memory sets near the memory span. It is concluded that memory scanning does not involve implicit speech. The results are discussed in terms of mechanisms underlying the management of active memory.
