Semantic specificity in cued recall.

In three cued recall experiments, extralist retrieval cues that were congruous in meaning to an encoded target pair of words produced better recall of the targets than when the cue-target relation was incongruous. However, this result. which differs from that of other experiments. depended in some cases on scoring recall of a target pair when either member of the pair was recalled. It is argued that (1) pairs of words are typically stored as higher order units. (2) the best test procedure is to request recall of both members of the pair when an extralist cue is presented. and (3) semantic features provide an important dimension in the mnemonic representation of word events.