Abstract: Three experiments which involve the visual superiority effect in longterm memory are reported here. The studied materials in Experiment 1 areChinese Characters, the subjects are Beijing natives and Cantonese. The stu-died materials in Experiment 2 is English, American and Chinese arethe subjects; Experiment 3 has Japanese as the studied materials and Japan-ese as subjects. All of the three experiments include visual vs. auditory in-put mode. The results of these three experiments support the differential-frequency interpretation of the visual superiority effect, i. e. if a set ofwords is encountered more frequently in readings than in speech, then a memo-rial superiority of visually presented words over auditorily presented ones willbe obtained.

Key words: differential-frequency interpretation, Long-term memory, visual superiority effect, serial position curve