Abstract
Two experiments were conducted to investigate the effects of word length on item and order memory. In both experiments, a free recall test and a reconstruction test were conducted to measure item and order memory, respectively. Five short words or 5 long words were presented at the learning phase and tested after a delay of 7.5s. In Experiment 1, both free recall and reconstruction tests were intermingled. In Experiment 2, each of these tests was presented in a blocked format. Both experiments demonstrated that long words had an advantage at the last serial position and short words had an advantage at other serial positions in a free recall test, while word length had no effect in a reconstruction test. These results suggest that the encoding of item information is processed at different stages or subsystems than the encoding of order information.
