The production effect and semantic relatedness : encoding the complex - definitions to words

This research was a part of an Honours thesis exploring the possible boundaries of the Production Effect. The production effect is a memory strategy that has shown to improve recall of encoded stimuli by simply reading them aloud, relative to reading silently. Our sample of 12 participants (10 female), age between 18 and 52 (M = 35.3), were requested to complete a single one-hour experiment session. The participants read 80 randomly sequenced word definitions, half aloud and half silently, before an active rest stage. The participants were later tested with 80 randomly sequenced single words and were asked to recall if they had read the definition in the preceding study period. Of these 80 test words: 20 definitions were read silently, 20 definitions were read aloud, and 40 were foils whose definitions had not been read. We found no significant difference between stimuli read silently and stimuli read aloud, thus no production effect. This could have been overshadowed by the Generation Effect as the participants were likely trying to assign a word to the definition. This could have provided a deeper form of encoding that influenced their rates of recall.