Modality and suffix effects in the absence of auditory stimulation

Abstract

Three experiments showed that silent mouthing or lipreading of immediate-memory lists leads to modality and suffix effects of the sort formerly believed to occur only following auditory presentation. Although lip-read and mouthed suffixes interfered somewhat with recency recall of auditory items, and vice versa, the suffix effect was greatest when the modality of the suffix matched exactly that of the test items. These findings are inconsistent with previous assumptions about sensory memory (precategorical acoustic storage). Specifically, it now seems likely that gestural information relevant to the synthesis of auditory features can also be held in a precategorical store specialized for auditory feature detection.