The phonological similarity effect in short-term memory (STM) is the finding that serial recall of lists of similar sounding items is poorer than that of dissimilar sounding items. This is traditionally argued to be due to a detrimental effect on memory for the order of the words in the list and not on memory for the words themselves. Models that propose forgetting from STM is due to interference must invoke an additional compensatory process where the shared element of the words acts as a cue to recall, in order to account for the lack of an effect on memory for the words. However, the possibility of a detrimental effect of phonological similarity on item memory when these compensatory processes are not available has not been investigated. Two experiments (n = 60 and n = 57) in which similarity is operationalized in a way that precludes usage of compensatory processes are reported. The results clearly demonstrate that item recall is poorer for similar lists than dissimilar lists when similarity is defined in this way.

中文翻译：

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序列回忆任务中的语音相似性阻碍了项目回忆，而不仅仅是顺序

短期记忆（STM）中的语音相似性效应是发现相似发音项目列表的连续回忆比不同发音项目的差。传统上认为这是由于列表中单词的顺序对记忆的不利影响，而不是单词本身的记忆。建议由于干扰而从 STM 中遗忘的模型必须调用一个额外的补偿过程，其中单词的共享元素充当回忆的提示，以解释单词对记忆的影响。然而，当这些补偿过程不可用时，语音相似性对项目记忆的不利影响的可能性尚未得到研究。两个实验（n  = 60 和n = 57），其中相似性以排除使用补偿过程的方式进行操作。结果清楚地表明，当以这种方式定义相似性时，相似列表的项目回忆比不相似列表更差。