Orthography, phonology, and meaning: Word features that give rise to feelings of familiarity in recognition

In the present study, it is shown that participants can recognize test cues as resembling studied words even when these cues cannot be used to recall the words that they resemble. After studying a list of words, participants were given a cued recall test for which half of the cues resembled studied words on one particular feature dimension and half resembled nonstudied words on that dimension. In addition to trying to use each cue to recall a study list item, participants rated the degree to which the cue resembled a studied word. For those cues whose targets could not be identified, the mean rating was higher when the cues corresponded to studied items than when they corresponded to nonstudied items. Various types of features can give rise to this phenomenon, which was found when orthographic, phonemic, and semantic cued recall tasks were used. In all of these cases of recognition without recall, analysis of receiver operating characteristics revealed a pattern consistent with that of an equal-variance signal detection process.