Abstract: Two experiments were carried out, using control subjects to encodemodes and loads of information. The purpose was to explore the relativeefficiency of semantic and phonetic encoding in verbal memory. Theresults showed that perfomances of semantic encoding were better thanthose of phonetic encoding in either short-term or long-term memory,and this is also true in either one-trial recall task or multi-trialreconstructing-word-pairs tasks. The reason is perhaps to be found inthe depth of processing information by the subjects. Another result of this research demonstrated that both semanticand phonetic information can be stored in either short-term orlong-term storing system. Thus it can be seen that, there is no inherentrelation between the encoding of information and of memory in the twokinds of memory systems.

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