MOJIBAKE – The Rehearsal of Word Fragments In Verbal Recall | Developmental Psychology

Original Research ARTICLE

Front. Psychol. | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00350

MOJIBAKE – The Rehearsal of Word Fragments In Verbal Recall

Dr. Christiane Lange-Küttner^1* and Eva Sykorova¹

• 
  ¹Faculty of Life Sciences and Computing, London Metropolitan University, United Kingdom
  

Theories of verbal rehearsal usually assume that whole words are
being rehearsed. However, words consist of letter sequences, or
syllables, or word onset-vowel-coda, amongst many other
conceptualizations of word structure. A more general term is the ‘grain
size’ of word units (Ziegler & Goswami, 2005). In the current study,
a new method measured the quantitative percentage of correctly
remembered word structure. The amount of letters in the correct letter
sequence as per cent of word length was calculated, disregarding missing
or added letters. A forced rehearsal was tested by repeating each
memory list four times. We tested low frequency (LF) English words
versus geographical UK town names to control for content. We also tested
unfamiliar international (INT) non-words and names of international
(INT) European towns to control for familiarity. An immediate versus
distributed repetition was tested with a between-subject design.
Participants responded with word fragments in their written recall
especially when they had to remember unfamiliar words. While memory of
whole words was sensitive to content, presentation distribution and
individual sex and language differences, recall of word fragments was
not. There was no trade-off between memory of word fragments with whole
word recall during the repetition, instead also word fragments
significantly increased. Moreover, while whole word responses correlated
with each other during repetition, and word fragment responses
correlated with each other during repetition, these two types of word
recall responses were not correlated with each other. Thus there may be a
lower layer consisting of free, sparse word fragments and an upper
layer that consists of language-specific, orthographically and
semantically constrained words.

Keywords:
Word Fragments, Word Rehearsal, working memory, Visual cache, Inner Scribe, word form, Orthographic pattern




Citation: Lange-Küttner D and Sykorova E
(2015).
MOJIBAKE – The Rehearsal of Word Fragments In Verbal Recall.
Front. Psychol.
6:350.
doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00350




Received: 23 Oct 2014;
Accepted: 12 Mar 2015.

Edited by:

Christopher Jarrold, University of Bristol, United Kingdom

Reviewed by:



Gary Jones, Nottingham Trent University, United Kingdom
Colin Hamilton, University of Northumbria, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK, United Kingdom  

Copyright: © 2015 Lange-Küttner and Sykorova. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY).
The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted,
provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the
original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with
accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is
permitted which does not comply with these terms.




* Correspondence:

Prof. Dr. Christiane Lange-Küttner, London Metropolitan
University, Faculty of Life Sciences and Computing, 166-220 Holloway
Road, London, N7 8DB, London, United Kingdom,
c.langekuettner@londonmet.ac.uk



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