HL Psychology Internal Assessment:

Investigating the effect of articulatory

suppression on the recall of

phonologically dissimilar letters.

Words: 2200

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 Contents

1)Introduction (page 3 to 5)

2)Exploration (page 6 to 8)

3)Analysis (page 8 to 10)

4)Evaluation (page 11 to 13)

5)Bibliography (page 14)

6)Appendix (15 to 16)

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 Introduction

The working memory model was proposed by Alan Baddeley and Graham Hitch in 1974.

Their model proposes that short term memory is a working memory store. A working

memory store can be defined as something that temporarily holds and stores relevant

information for various cognitive functions. Baddeley and Hitch proposed that the short

term memory does this with the help of four components: episodic buffer, central executive,

visuospatial sketchpad, and the phonological loop where each component generally acts

independently of the others despite the fact that the central executive, which is essentially a

control center which determines how much information can be stored in each component.

This indicates that the model posits that there is a limited capacity to components (Ötzke

and McElree). The specific component I will be focusing on is the phonological loop which

is suggested to temporarily store auditory information (like speech and other verbal

stimuli) known as the phonological store, it aids in the comprehension of spoken language

and maintaining the memory of auditory information when it is still needed for a certain

task (Mcleod, S.A 2012). However, as a component of the working memory model the

phonological loop also has a limit to the amount of auditory information it can hold

(Aboitiz, 2010) .I will be looking at the phonological loop by replicating the study on

auditory suppression by Phillip Landry and Carl Bartling in 2011.

The aim of my investigation is to investigate if auditory suppression affects the written

recall of a list of phonologically dissimilar letters. This study is relevant to my school

community in particular because I know a multitude of people who tend to study when

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music is playing and there is often a lot of debate whether studying with music is hindering

the active recall of what you study or does not affect it at all. In addition, studying the

theory of the working memory model is also relevant to my school and arguably all schools

due to the fact that assessments rely to a great degree on the working memory of students

and their ability to actively recall information during the test. This is important to

investigate because through the working memory model and study on the phonological

loop new teaching strategies and self-study strategies can be formulated to manipulate the

capacities of student’s phonological loops in order to ensure better retention and recall of

content and as a result improve performance on exams.

My investigation will utilize articulatory suppression to overload the phonological loop in

order to see whether it maintains its function of temporary storage and the maintenance of

information to the same degree when articulatory suppression is not applied to the recall of

letters. This is essentially applying the everyday action of multitasking. Multitasking in this

context applies the same sub-system of the working memory model, the phonological loop,

during the encoding and retrieval of memory. The behavior of multitasking is

operationalized into a quantifiable independent variable of an articulatory suppression

task.

Null Hypothesis (Ho): There is no significant difference in the number of phonologically

dissimilar letters recalled out of 7 letters in the presence of articulatory suppression, as the

constant vocal repetition of the numbers 1 and 2 at a rate of once per second.

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Alternative Hypothesis (HA): There is a significant difference in the number of

phonologically dissimilar letters recalled out of 7 letters in the presence of articulatory

suppression, operationalized as the constant vocal repetition of the numbers 1 and 2 at a

rate of once per second.

Exploration

Research Design:

The research design used was an independent sample design with two separate groups as

we selected participants to be in the experimental (articulatory suppression) group or the

control (without articulatory suppression) group so that each grade would be represented

equally in both conditions. I used an independent measures design instead of repeated

measures design to avoid having participants understand the study and becoming biased to

intentionally or unintentionally helping or hindering the study. In addition, if repeated

measures design was used then participants could become familiar with the letters used in

the study and remember them regardless of articulatory suppression. To avoid order

effects, which is referring to the influence of the order or sequence in which stimuli is

presented can have on a participant’s response, is another reason why I used independent

measures design.

Sampling technique:

The sampling technique used was a self-selected sample as an email was sent out to the

entire high school asking for participants in the psychology study. The email had a google

consent form attached (see appendix 1) and children younger than 16 had a specific form

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where they were asked to get their parent’s consent to participate in the study (see

appendix 5). This sampling method was employed for its convenience as we were able to

acquire our desired number of participants in a short amount of time without having to

chase down participants individually which would have taken longer. Furthermore, 5

participants were chosen from each grade to stratify the sample to be representative of our

high school population as there is relatively the same amount of children in each grade.

Choice of participants:

The sample was made up of 20 participants ranging from grades 9 to 12. By consequence

the age range was 14 to 17. All participants were proficient in the English language, this

was a requirement for understanding the study and a necessary requirement as we live in a

predominantly non-english speaking country. Participants under 16 had to get their

parents to complete the google consent form and participants above 16 were able to give

informed consent on their own.

Controlled variables:

Participants were randomly allocated to conditions in the group where articulatory

suppression was applied through the vocal repetition of the numbers 1 and 2 or the group

where memorization was done without articulatory suppression by numbering them 1

through 20 randomly to avoid experimenter bias on allocation of participants. Participants

were also read standardized briefing(instructions)/debriefing notes at the start and end of

the study to make sure the participants were informed one what participating in the study

meant and what they had to do during the study. The participants were all given the same

order of phonologically dissimilar letters in order to make the letters standardized to

increase internal validity of the results. In addition, all participants had the same amount of

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time to study the list of letters (10 seconds, using a stopwatch) and the same amount of

time to pause (10 seconds, using a stopwatch) before being allowed to write down the

letters, as this increases the credibility of the results, on a piece of paper to eliminate the

possibility of different timings given to each participant being a confounding variable in the

study. This is because if given more time it would be easier to memorize.

Materials:

1. A consent form to avoid the ethical ramification of not getting informed consent

(appendix 1).

2. Briefing/debriefing notes to make sure the participants understand what

participating in the study entailed (see appendix 2).

3. A whiteboard to write down the list of letters so that participants could memorize

them either with articulatory suppression or without.

4. The combination of these letters was taken from the original study.

5. A piece of paper and a pen per participant to recall the sequence of letters on.

6. Raw data table to record the raw data and to later process (appendix 3).

Procedure: (done as a group)

1. Participants gave informed consent through the google forms.

2. participants were read the standardized instructions by researchers (see appendix

2).

3. participants were presented with the sequence of letters (F,K,L,M,R,X and Q) on the

whiteboard.

4. Participants were given 10 seconds to memorize the letters (see appendix 6). They

did this differently depending on the group they were in. The articulatory

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 suppression group had to repeat the numbers 1 and 2 out loud during recall.

Whereas the control group did not.

5. A 10 second pause was administered to avoid the recency effect, which is a bias

where one remembers something better if they have just encountered it.

6. Participants were told to recall the sequence of letters on the paper provided and

were scored on their accuracy out of 7.

7. Afterwards, the papers were collected and the participants were debriefed

(standardized).

Analysis

Descriptive statistics:

Figure 1:The average and standard deviation of the recall of phonologically

dissimilar letters in groups in which articulatory suppression was applied and was

not applied.

Condition Average recall of letters Standard Deviation of

Non articulatory 5.6 1.9

Articulatory suppression 3.6 2.1

As a measure of central tendency averages of the recall of both the experimental and the

control group, the mean was calculated in order for some sort of comparison to be made

between the performance of the two groups. The mean was chosen as there are no outliers

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in our raw data, therefore the mean gives a strong representation of all the results. To

compare the means, the control group where participants memorized the list of letters

normally had a higher mean at 5.6 out of 7 on average. This means that the control group

did better on average in recalling the list of letters in comparison to the articulatory

suppression group. In comparison to the experimental group, where participants had to

recite the numbers 1 and 2 when attempting to memorize the list, which had a mean of 3.6

out of 7 on average. Therefore, it may be suggested that the control group found recalling

the list of letters easier than the experimental group. In addition, as a measure of the

dispersion of the data, the standard deviation of both groups was calculated as well.

Standard deviation was calculated to display the distribution of the performance of

participants in the group from the mean. To compare, the standard deviation of the control

group was around 1.9. This value was smaller than the standard deviation of the

experimental group at 2.1. This demonstrates that the results for the experimental group

were more spread out than the results for the control group.

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Figure 2: A graph comparing the averages of the control and experimental group in

recall of the standardized list of letters.

Inferential statistics:

To assess significance of these findings a Mann Whitney U test was conducted using an

online calculator. I used the Mann Whitney U test because the data we collected was ordinal

data. In addition, I have two conditions through an independent measures design and my

aim is to determine whether the difference observed in the averages of the two groups was

significant or not. Furthermore, I conducted a one tail test and from our calculations (see

Appendix 4) the test returned a statistically significant result U(13.5, 17.5) = 20, p = 0.0129

. This means that our results had a 1% chance of occurring due to random chance, therefore

we reject the null hypothesis and accept the alternative hypothesis: There is a significant

difference in the number of phonologically dissimilar letters recalled out of 7 letters in the

presence of articulatory suppression, operationalized as the constant vocal repetition of the

numbers 1 and 2 at a rate of once per second.

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 Evaluation

Findings:

My findings indicate that I can reject the null hypothesis and accept the alternate

hypothesis since my p value is p < 0.05 .This means my findings suggest that there is a

significant difference in the recall of the list of phonologically dissimilar letters and whether

articulatory suppression was applied or not as articulatory suppression hindered the

performance of recall in participants in the experimental group. Consequently, this does

follow the theory behind the working memory model. We can actually see the theory of the

model being followed manifesting in our study in an area other than the inferential

statistics as the average recall of participants in the control group was 2 points higher than

the participants performing articulatory suppression in the control group, 5.6 > 3.6. This

does demonstrate that participants found recall harder when articulatory suppression was

applied because less letters were able to be recalled as a result of the application of

articulatory suppression through the vocal repetition of the numbers 1 and 2.This may be

because participants in the articulatory suppression group experienced disruption of the

phonological loop in the presence of articulatory suppression. Articulatory suppression

overloaded the rehearsal capability of the participants and their phonological loop. This

therefore affected their ability to encode the sequence of letters and recall it later on paper

in comparison to the group without articulatory suppression .This aspect of our findings

does demonstrate the theory of the working memory model as the phonological loop is

seemingly being overloaded through the constant repetition of the articulatory suppression

which was operationalized as repeating the numbers 1 and 2 at a rate of once per second.

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Strengths:

A strength of my study was that due to my independent measures design, it prevented

biases that would have obstructed the reliability of the results like demand characteristics

and order effects which are participants acting in a certain way to attempt to influence the

results and how the order of presenting stimuli can affect participants' response . Another

strength of my study regarding the sample of the study was that all participants had the

same level of education, albeit minute variation due to grade level, and all the participants

were non psychology students which meant that there would be very little room for

demand characteristics to manifest in the study. Another strength of this study was that

every participant was given the same sequence letters and every participant had the same

amount of time to memorize the sequence and the same pause time before recalling the

sequence on a piece of paper. This is favorable because there was no issue of varying

difficulty of the sequences of letters, this could have been a confounding variable as if we

had not controlled this then the reliability of our results would decrease as it would reduce

the comparability of the two groups.

Weaknesses:

On the other hand, a weakness of my study in regards to the design of the study is that it did

not account for people’s varying aptitude of memory this means that disrupting their

process of the phonological loop would take a more severe degree of articulatory

suppression than just repeating the numbers 1 and 2 out loud, for future investigation a

preliminary memory test could be done to establish a sample with similar memory skills. In

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addition, another weakness of the study in accordance with the sampling method is that the

participants, who were students from our school, are accustomed to taking tests reliant on

memory. Therefore, older age groups which have more experience with memory test taking

have an unfair advantage when it comes to a memorization test like I conducted. I would

modify the composition of the sample to include students from other education systems

with less test taking experience as well as people who have not been in education for a

while and thus have not taken a test in some time. Furthermore, another weakness of my

study would be that often participants would get confused in the experimental condition as

to what they were instructed to do when the standardized instructions were read and I

often had to do visual demonstrations to make them understand more, this could be

considered a confounding variable as some participants were subject to more help than

others so their performance in recall could be different to participants who did not get help.

This aspect detracts from the credibility of the findings. To eliminate this in the future I

would describe the instructions in a much clearer fashion so that the study is easily

understood. In conclusion, in accordance with our findings we have deduced that in regards

to the working memory model the phonological loop is not significantly affected by

articulatory suppression.

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 Bibliography
Aboitiz, Francisco, et al. “The Phonological Loop: A Key Innovation in Human Evolution.” Current
Anthropology, vol. 51, no. S1, 2010, pp. S55–65. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.1086/650525. Accessed 8
Nov. 2023.

Landry, P., & Bartling, C. "American Journal of Psychological Research." 24 May 2011,
https://www.mcneese.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/AJPR-11-07-Landry-5-09.pdf.

McLeod, S. A. (2012). Working memory. Simply Psychology.

Murray, D. J., Rowan, A. J., and Smith, K. H. "American Psychological Association." Apa PsycNet. 1988,
https://doi.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2Fh008420412. Accessed 21 March 2022.

Ötzke and McElree. "Relationship between measures of working memory capacity and the time
course of short memory retrieval and inference resolution." American Psychological Association.
Accessed 6 Nov 2023, https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/features/xlm-36-2-383.pdf.

Vassar College. "VassarStats: Website for Statistical Computation." http://vassarstats.net/utest.html.

Appendix

Appendix 1:

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Appendix 2:
Briefing notes
CONTROL=
In this study we will sit participants down one by one and participants will be asked to attempt to remember
7 letters. Participants will have 10 seconds to memorize the letters and a 10 second pause time. Afterwards
they will have to write down the correct sequence of the letters shown to them on the whiteboard at the front.
You have the right to withdraw at any time you desire.

EXPERIMENTAL=
In this study we will sit participants down one by one and participants will be asked to attempt to remember
7 letters. Participants will have 10 seconds to memorize the letters and a 10 second pause time. Afterwards
they will have to write down the correct sequence of the letters shown to them on the whiteboard at the front.
However, participants have to repeat the numbers 1 and 2 at a rate of once per second during the time
allocated to write down the letters on the piece of paper. You have the right to withdraw any time you desire.

Debriefing notes
Thank you for participating in our study. You have taken part in a study regarding articulatory suppression to
investigate an existing model of memory called the working memory model. Your results will be kept
anonymous.
Appendix 3:

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Appendix 4: (Vassarstats)

Appendix 5:

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