Effect of Modality on Transfer of Linguistic Stimuli from Short-Term to Long Term Memory: Evidence on Immediate and Delayed Recall

Abstract

Memory is considered as an important cognitive domain found to be important in our daily-walks of life. Short term and long term memory are considered as the main variants under memory. The information in short term memory is prone to be transferred to the long term memory through attention, practice, rehearsal. The current study aims to investigate the effect of modality on transfer of linguistic stimuli from short to long term memory. 20 neuro-typical Tamil speaking participants were recruited for the study. The participants were divided into two groups based on random sampling. Auditory task was administered on the first group where the participants were presented with sentences and were asked to remember the key/content word. While auditory plus visual task was administered on the second group of participants. Recall of key/content words was tested at the level of immediate and delayed recall conditions. On immediate recall condition, there was no difference between the two groups but on delayed recall condition, modality of stimulus presentation had a significant role as the group presented with auditory stimulus performed well compared to the group presented with auditory plus visual modalities