Recognition failure of words with a single meaning

Recognition failure of recallable words was demonstrated with single-meaning target words after a 7-day retention interval. When overall levels of recognition were equated, the magnitude of the effect was the same as that observed with high-frequency words of multiple meanings in other experiments. It was concluded that, contrary to suggestions of Reder, Anderson, and Bjork (1974), encoding specificity is not limited to words that have several semantic senses. The experiment also provided evidence contrary to the hypothesis that recall of unrecognized items comes about because of additional learning opportunities afforded by the recognition test.