Primacy and recency in nonword repetition.

An increasing body of evidence suggests that nonword repetition is related to immediate serial memory (e.g., Baddeley, Gathercole, & Papagno, 1998; Gathercole & Baddeley, 1993). One possible account of this relationship is that a nonword is processed like a list when it is first encountered. If this is the case, it should be possible to detect serial position effects in repetition of single nonwords. Three experiments tested this prediction. Experiment 1 examined whether there would be syllable serial position primacy and recency effects in repetition of polysyllabic nonwords, and obtained both primacy and recency effects. Experiments 2 and 3 showed that these effects were not due to the controlled duration of the nonwords or the requirements of concurrent articulation or the procedure by which nonwords were created.