The modality effect and articulation

The two experiments reported in this paper investigate the influences of irrelevant articulation on the modality effect in serial recall. Subjects performed a post-list distractor task, which involved generating a well-learned alphabetic sequence for five seconds. The modality effect was impaired when subjects vocalized the letters aloud, but was unaffected by whether the sequence was silently mouthed or silently written. These results show that the modality effect does not arise from the contribution of an articulatory code to recall of the most recent auditory items. They also question the functional equivalence of recency effects for auditory, mouthed and lipread stimuli. On the basis of these and other findings, a multi-component approach to recency effects is proposed.