STM capacity for Chinese words and idioms: chunking and acoustical loop hypotheses.

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 £han 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.