Abstract
Mizuno & Matsui (2012a, b) examined the effect of visual and phonological information on memory span by manipulating the number of characters and that of moras of Japanese words. The results suggested that participants with relatively large memory span rely more heavily on visual information while those with small memory span on phonological information in maintaining words in working memory. We considered that word maintaining strategy relying on phonological information should be disadvantageous than that relying on visual information because many Japanese words have homophones. This study aimed to demonstrate this idea by comparing the memory span of words with homophones and that of words without homophones in presenting the words auditorily. The result showed that the memory span of words with homophones was smaller than that of words without homophones, indicating that the strategy relying on phonological information is inefficient for the maintenance of Japanese words with many homophones.
