The effect of lexical factors on recall from working memory: Generalizing the neighborhood size effect.

The word-length effect, the finding that lists of short words are better recalled than lists of long words, is 1 of the 4 benchmark phenomena that guided development of the phonological loop component of working memory. However, previous work has noted a confound in word-length studies: The short words used had more orthographic neighbors (valid words that can be made by changing a single letter in the target word) than long words. The confound is that words with more neighbors are better recalled than otherwise comparable words with fewer neighbors.