Retention of phonemic and semantic features of words.

Subjects were asked to detect either repetitions, rhymes, or words from the same category during an auditory or visual list presentation. It was discovered in both cases that the number of intervening words had a differential effect on probability of detection, with phonemic feature detection deteriorating more rapidly than semantic. However, "rate" of presentation did not have a differential effect on the probability of feature detection, since phonemic and semantic feature detection improved equally with increased interword interval time. It was suggested that phonemic feature retention might be more vulnerable than semantic feature retention to interference.