Pauses as Recoding Points in Letter Series

It was hypothesized that temporal pauses in letter series are the major places at which receding occurs, either in terms of a pronunciation code (e.g., VAF) or a meaningful code (e.g., IBM). If pauses determine the units on which receding is attempted, then there will be an optimal and several nonoptimal ways to locate pauses in a given series of codable trigrams. Three immediate recall experiments confirmed this expectation, comparing optimal pausing with several nonoptimal ways of presenting the sequences. Analyses of transition error probabilities supported the view that pauses determine S's recall units, that recall is superior when a pause-bound group is recodable, and that subjectively coded groups are detectable even when no pauses occur in the series.