Words Fragments as Aids to Recall: the Organization of a Word

Abstract

This paper discusses the organization of a single word. It shows that the beginning of a word is the best cue for eliciting that word; the middle is the poorest cue. Subject was shown a list of words one by one on a memory drum. (Some lists had six-letter words and some had nine-letter words.) Then subject saw a fragment of the word, and he had to recall the entire word. A beginning fragment elicited the correst response most readily and with the shortest latency. The middle elicited the correst response least readily and with the longest latency. These results are also related to the issue of associative symmetry.