Abstract: Based on previous studies, in this experiment, two hypothesis about the mech anism of Feeling-of-knowing(FOK)-the cue familiarity hypothesis and the target memorability hypothesis (or retrievability hypothesis) were re-verified. Th e design of this experiment was 2×3 within-group design. The two factors were l evels of materials (meaningful and meaningless associated Chinese word-pairs), a nd three types of connections of the word-pairs: (1) A-B A-B; (2) A-D A-B; (3) C-B . The participants were undergraduates of Peking University, 10 men and 10 women, their age ranged from 18-22. The program of experiment was made in Visua l Basic, and the experiment was conducted on 586 computer. The materials were a list of 132 pairs of two-syllable Chinese word-pairs. 60 pairs were in the first half and 60 pair s in the second, 6 pairs were used for exercise, 6 pairs as buffers. The materia ls were presented to subjects in a random order that maintained the first-half-s econd-half distinction. The procedure included four phases: (1) Word-pairs learn ing, subjects were instructed to learn a list of pairs of items, and were told t hat after learning when later presented with the left item, they could recall th e right ones. (2) Cued recall, Subjects were given the cue items and asked to wr ite down the target words. (3) FOK judgment: all the cues were presented randoml y, subjects were asked to make a FOK judgment on a scale from 1 to 10. (4) Force d-choice recognition tests: six alternatives were used, the target was one of th e alternatives and was placed in a random position with respect to the other opt ions.The subjects’ choices and reaction time were recorded by computer. The ran king of the magnitude of FOK judgments was higher when cues were repeated than w hen not repeated. The subjects’ recall performance of the meaningful word-pairs was higher than the meaningless ones. This indicated that the memorial strength of the targets were significantly different between two types of materials. Thi s difference determined the magnitude of FOK judgments. The magnitude of FOK jud gment for the meaningful word-pairs was significantly higher than the meaningles s ones. This experiment favors the point that the magnitude of FOK judgment was determined by both cue familiarity and target memorability, which are not absolu tely against each other. But to significantly influence the rank of FOK judgment , the intensity of the two factors must at least reach a certain degree.

Key words: FOK judgment, target retrievability, cue familiarity