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Phonetic similarity of the sound to be learned and the sound which is substituted may be an important variable governing phonological acquisition. The effect of phonetic similarity was measured in a recall test involving two retention intervals—three minutes and seven days. Accordingly, the /sn/ cluster appearing in the word snow was selected as the sound for which children were to make substitutions. English and non-English clusters varying in phonetic similarity to /sn/ were selected to replace /sn/. The results indicated that phonetic similarity influenced the retention of English and non-English clusters; recall showed the least decrement for those most similar to /sn/. Imitation was tested by asking subjects to imitate the substituted cluster after the seven-day recall test. For all clusters, imitation was surprisingly stable after seven days, suggesting that "motor memory" for speech sounds is highly stable over long intervals of time.
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