Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We investigated whether semantic diversity (SemD) influences immediate serial recall for words. SemD was calculatedusing LSA to quantify semantic similarity across contexts in large corpus. We examined the effects of SemD and im-ageability, a classic semantic variable. Participants saw and recalled the 6-word list by typing out the words in correctserial order. Experiment 1 was conducted in the laboratory (N=40). There was no main effect of SemD or imageabilitybut exploratory analyses showed that SemD was modulated by list position and imageability. Among high-imageabilitywords, low-SemD words were better recalled in latter positions (4 & 5) of the list. Experiment 2 conducted online (N=44)replicated the results, showing better recall of low-SemD words in the high-imageability condition at Position 5. Thesefindings suggest that the availability of more semantic connections induces more competition between items, which im-pacts on performance later on in serial recall.