A common basis for auditory sensory storage in perception and immediate memory

Thirty-two subjects participated in three experiments, one assessing auditory short-term memory for word lists with and without a verbal suffix and two assessing discrimination of synthetic vowels at either short or long interstimulus delays. The purpose was to find out whether the same kind of auditory memory supports both short-term memory and speech discrimination. There was a significant correlation between performance in the suffix and A-X speech-discrimination experiments in those conditions likely to depend partly on echoic memory; however, there was no significant correlation between the tasks in conditions in which echoic memory was presumed to have been removed. The results provide a bridge between perception and memory procedures and support a theoretical model that was made to cover both domains.