Recognition without Cued Recall across Chinese and English: Exploring the Role of Phonological, Orthographic, and Semantic Features

Recognition without cued recall (RWCR) is a phenomenon that participants can effectively discriminate cues that resemble studied items from the ones that do not, even when they are not able to recall a studied item which is cued at test. It has been shown that a word’s features could give rise to the RWCR effect. In the present study, by using this paradigm, we systematically investigated whether particular types of features alone, including orthographic, phonological, and semantic features, could evoke feelings of familiarity. By taking the advantage of a logographically scripted language (i.e., Chinese) to dissociate phonological from orthographic features in Experiment 1 and vice versa in Experiment 2, we examined whether phonological and orthographic features could induce a significant RWCR effect. In Experiment 3, by using a cross-language design to dissociate sematic features from orthographic and phonological features, we further explored whether separate semantic features could elicit the RWCR effect. A significant RWCR effect was found in all these experiments. These results have demonstrated that familiarity could be based on separate phonological, orthographic, and semantic features. The results are further discussed in relation to several theoretical explanations of familiarity.