Pauses and durations exhibit a serial position effect.

This article reports evidence of two kinds of serial position effects in immediate serial recall: One involves interresponse pauses, and the other response durations. In forward and backward recall, responding was faster at initial and final positions than at center positions, exhibitinga bow-shaped function relative to serial position. These data were obtained in a spoken recall study in which ungrouped lists of four to six words and postcuing of recall direction were used. The pause pattern is consistent with several models of serial memory, including a distinctiveness model (Brown, Neath, & Chater, 2002) and a version of the ACT-R model augmented with a spontaneous grouping strategy (Maybery, Parmentier, & Jones, 2002). The duration pattern suggests that response articulation depends on the processing context, rather than being modular.