Abstract: The purpose of this experiment was to discuss that the influence of output time for performance of short-term memory (STM) in oral and writing output modes. The task was a digit span test. When presented singular sequences, subjects were required to report two kinds of sequences in oral and writing modes, one was the original singular sequences, the other was the sequences with additional characters of different length prior to the each digit. Given the stimuli of same length, we found the output time was longer when adding some characters in both oral and writing output modes. The performance was declining with the increase of the output time in oral report, but not in writing. This result was inferred that the total output time was not a good predictor of span in STM. On the other hand, it also suggested that the influential factor was may not be delay time, but articulatory time.

Key words: output time, digit span, articulatory time, delay time