Semantic versus Acoustic Coding: Retention and Conditions of Organization 1

Incidental learning techniques were employed in two experiments to investigate differences in semantic and acoustic coding with regard to retention and organization. The incidental task required subjects to judge pairs of words as being either related or unrelated on a specified dimension, acoustic or semantic. Intentional learning subjects received the same words but were instructed to remember. Instructions to learn enhanced recall and clustering of acoustically related words but had no affect on the usefulness of semantic relationships. Regardless of learning instructions, semantic relationships were more effective than acoustic ones. Results of Experiment II revealed no effects of acoustic similarity when it was unconfounded with orthographic similarity.