Enhancement of 4-year-old children's memory span for phonologically similar and dissimilar word lists

Previous research suggests that preschool children are deficient in rehearsal and that stimulus list repetitions can improve their recall, presumably by substituting for the products of rehearsal. However, the previous research included interitem or postlist retention intervals of several seconds or more. We examined the utility of list repetitions with reference to an ordinary span task in which spoken words were presented 1 s apart for immediate recall. Lists with phonologically similar versus dissimilar items were included, to determine if the overall pattern of recall could be made more similar to what is ordinarily obtained in older children. Cumulative repetition was found to cause a moderate increase in both memory span and the phonological similarity effect. Other types of list repetition provided more insight into types of stimulus redundancy that were helpful (e.g., repeated serial order information) or not helpful (e.g., forced articulatory coding) to children attempting to recall spoken lists. The underlying mnemonic processes are discussed.