Dr Aris conducted an experiment to investigate whether acoustic similarity affects short-term memory recall.

He split his participants into two groups:

• Condition A: Participants were given a list of acoustically similar words (e.g., map, cab, mad, cap) to recall.
• Condition B: Participants were given a list of acoustically dissimilar words (e.g., tree, light, pen, road) to recall.

Each word list contained 12 words. Each participant only took part in one condition.

The results of Dr Aris's experiment are shown in Table 1.

Table 1: Number of words recalled correctly out of 12