Cognitive Processes in Counting

Abstract

Five experiments investigated the effects of articulatory suppression and unattended speech on performance in simple counting tasks. Results were consistent in showing substantial disruption of counting performance by concurrent articulatory suppression. However, when response errors occurred, they tended to be numerically close to the correct figure, suggesting that performance was not totally disrupted by suppression. A small effect of unattended speech on counting was obtained when the unattended speech was phonologically similar to numbers used in counting. A larger effect on counting was observed when the unattended speech consisted of random number sequences; however, this effect was much less than that found with suppression. These results are tentatively interpreted in terms of two separate components of the counting task: subvocalization of a running total and priming of the most recently accessed numbers in an input register or long-term memory. © 1987 American Psychological Association.