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  ¹Faculty of Life Sciences and Computing, London Metropolitan University, United Kingdom
  

Theories of verbal rehearsal usually assume that whole words are
being rehearsed. However, words consist of letter sequences, or
syllables, or word onset-vowel-coda, amongst many other
conceptualizations of word structure. A more general term is the ‘grain
size’ of word units (Ziegler & Goswami, 2005). In the current study,
a new method measured the quantitative percentage of correctly
remembered word structure. The amount of letters in the correct letter
sequence as per cent of word length was calculated, disregarding missing
or added letters. A forced rehearsal was tested by repeating each
memory list four times. We tested low frequency (LF) English words
versus geographical UK town names to control for content. We also tested
unfamiliar international (INT) non-words and names of international
(INT) European towns to control for familiarity. An immediate versus
distributed repetition was tested with a between-subject design.
Participants responded with word fragments in their written recall
especially when they had to remember unfamiliar words. While memory of
whole words was sensitive to content, presentation distribution and
individual sex and language differences, recall of word fragments was
not. There was no trade-off between memory of word fragments with whole
word recall during the repetition, instead also word fragments
significantly increased. Moreover, while whole word responses correlated
with each other during repetition, and word fragment responses
correlated with each other during repetition, these two types of word
recall responses were not correlated with each other. Thus there may be a
lower layer consisting of free, sparse word fragments and an upper
layer that consists of language-specific, orthographically and
semantically constrained words.