An Alignment-based Account of Serial Recall

The task of serial recall has become the touchstone for theories of short term memory. Many simple yet powerful computational models have been proposed to account for performance in the task. However, these models typically make only tangential reference to language processes, despite the fact that a key determinant of performance on the task is the extent to which the to-be-learned list mimics the structure of natural language (Miller & Selfridge 1950). The Syntagmatic Paradigmatic model (SP), a memory-based account of sentence processing, is applied to serial recall. Employing an alignment mechanism derived from String Edit Theory (SET; Sankoff & Kruskal 1983), the SP is able to account for the U shaped serial position curve, patterns of interlist and intralist intrusions and the multiply bowed serial position curve that occurs with grouped study lists.