Abstract
The capacity of short-term memory (STM) for verbal materials depends both upon the number of familiar chunks and upon the average complexity (number of syllables) of the chunks. A model that predicts STM capacity well was built, incorporating these two factors, for a number of experiments that used both Chinese and English language materials. One experiment, which used Chinese homophones, showed that STM has a nonacoustical (visual or semantic) component as well as an acoustical one. STM capacity for material encoded nonphonologically appears to be no greater than three chunks, whereas acoustical STM has a capacity of up to seven chunks. This result was confirmed by an experiment using chunks (radicals) that do not possess highly familiar one-syllable names.
Article PDF
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Baddeley, A. D. (1966). Short-term memory for word sequences as a function of acoustic, semantic and formal similarity.Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology,18, 362–365.
Baddeley, A. D. (1981). The concept of working memory: A view of its current state and probable future development.Cognition,10, 17–23.
Baddeley, A. D. (1983). Working memory.Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, London,B302, 311–324.
Baddeley, A. D., Thomson, N., &Buchanan, M. (1975). Word length and structure of short-term memory.Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior,14, 575–589.
Brooks, L. R. (1967). The suppression of visualization by reading.Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology,19, 289–299.
Chase, W. G., &Ericsson, K. A. (1982). Skill and working memory In G. H. Bower (Ed.),The Psychology of learning and motivation (Vol. 16). New York: Academic Press.
Chase, W. G., &Simon, H. A. (1973a). The mind’s eye in chess. In W. G. Chase (Ed.),Visual information processing. New York: Academic Press.
Chase, W. G., &Simon, H. A. (1973b) Perception in chess.Cognitive Psychology,4, 55–81
Conrad, R. (1964). Acoustic confusion in Immediate memory.British Journal of Psychology,55, 75–84.
Conrad, R., &Hull, A. J. (1964). Information, acoustic confusion and memory span.British Journal of Psychology,55, 429–432
Hayes, J. R. M. (1952, January/March). Memory span for several vocabularies as function of vocabulary size.Quarterly Progress Report.
Mackworth, J. F. (1963). The relation between the visual image and post-perceptual Immediate memory.Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior,2, 75–85.
Miller, G. A. (1956). The magical number seven, plus or minus two: Some limits on our capacity for processing information.Psychological Review,63, 81–87
Murdock, B. B., Jr. (1961). The retention of individual items.Journal of Experimental Psychology,62, 618–625.
Peterson, L. R., &Peterson, M. (1959). Short-term retention of individual items.Journal of Experimental Psychology,58, 193–198.
Salame, P., &Baddeley, A. D. (1982). Disruption of short-term memory by unattended speech: Implications for the structure of working memory.Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior,21, 150–164.
Simon, H. A. (1974). How big is a chunk?Science,183, 482–488.
Tzeng, O. J. L., Hung, D. L., &Wang, W. S. (1977). Speech recodmg in reading Chinese characters.Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Learning and Memory,3, 621–630.
Vallar, G., &Baddeley, A. D. (1982). Short-term forgetting and the articulatory loop.Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology,34A, 53–60.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Additional information
This research was supported in part by Grant MD-07722 from the National Institute of Mental Health, and in part by a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Zhang, G., Simon, H.A. STM capacity for Chinese words and idioms: Chunking and acoustical loop hypotheses. Memory & Cognition 13, 193–201 (1985). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03197681
Received:
Accepted:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03197681