抄録
This study investigated the role of the central executive in the use of long-term memory, and in particular examined semantically encoding verbal stimuli using long-term information. A dual-task method was adopted. The primary task was an immediate serial recall which used two types of verbal stimuli, nonwords and words. It has been reported that the recall of words is better than the recall of nonwords because nonwords contain a phonological code without any semantic information, whereas words involve both types of information. The main analysis compared the performance of the recall of nonwords and words when secondary tasks were performed simultaneously. The secondary tasks were articulatory suppression and verification of simple arithmetic that imposed a burden on the phonological loop and central executive, respectively. The recall performance of the nonwords was disrupted by the same amount by each of the secondary tasks. However, the recall performance of the words was effected more when an arithmetic task was performed. These results confirmed the assumption that the central executive plays an important role in semantically encoding verbal information.
