Studies indicate that lexical, semantic and phonological factors interact in verbal working memory. The phonological similarity effect (PSE), is modified by word concreteness. This emphasizes that verbal working memory performance cannot exclusively be attributed to phonological or acoustic representation but also includes an interaction of linguistic representation. What remains to be seen is whether linguistic representation is expressed at the time of recall or whether the representational methods used (such as recordings, videos, symbols, etc.) participate in a more fundamental role in encoding and preservation of information in memory. The brain relies primarily on acoustic (aka phonological) encoding for use in short-term storage and primarily semantic encoding for use in long-term storage.