The effect of orthographic familiarity on recall of stimulus items read aloud]

The purpose of this study was to examine the effect of orthographic familiarity on free recall of Katakana words which were read aloud. Two experiments were conducted to compare Katakana items with Hiragana ones about recall performance in incidental learning paradigm, in which subjects were instructed to perform a reading aloud task. In Experiment I, an immediate recall test was used. Number of correct free recall for high imagery items was larger than low imagery ones. In Experiment II, 30-s delay was inserted between an orienting task and a recall test. The recall performance indicated the superiority of Hiragana items. This result showed that the higher orthographic familiarity of stimulus item was, the poorer performance of its recall. It was interpreted in terms of the effect of cognitive effort on recall.