Effects of concreteness and semantic relatedness on composite imagery ratings and cued recall

Day and Bellezza (1983) rejected a dual coding imagery explanation for the superior recall of concrete words because unrelated concrete pairs were rated lower in composite imagery but were still remembered better than related abstract pairs. We show that dual coding theory explains their results and our new findings using the same paradigm. In Experiment 1, 120 subjects rated imagery or relatedness for 108 pairs that varied in concreteness, pair relatedness, and associative strength. Incidental cued recall followed. Relatedness and strength affected imagery ratings, as did concreteness, and very low relatedness partly accounted for the low composite imagery ratings for unrelated concrete pairs. Concreteness and relatedness also affected recall, and suporior recall for unrelated concrete pairs occurred consistently under imagery but not under relatedness instructions. In Experiment 2, 40 subjects rated imagery value and recalled 24 pairs. Subsequent questioning indicated that composite images were retrieved better given stimuli from unrelated concrete than from related abstract pairs. These findings and Day and Bellezza’s original results are explained in terms of (1) imaginal and verbal associative processes, which jointly influence composite imagery ratings and recall, and (2) the critical role of stimulus concreteness during image retrieval and recall (i.e., the conceptual peg hypothesis).