Marcus conducted an experiment to investigate whether phonological similarity affects short-term memory recall.

He recruited his participants from a Year 12 AS Level Psychology class. Marcus created two word lists, each consisting of ten common English nouns.

• List A: Acoustically dissimilar words (e.g., dog, key, map, bus).
• List B: Acoustically similar words (e.g., man, map, can, cap).

Both lists were read aloud to all participants and, immediately after hearing each list, they had to recall as many of the words as possible in the correct order.

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

Table 1: Number of words recalled correctly from List A and List B