 As learning would be affected by prior knowledge and understanding, he needed something that could be easily memorized but which had no prior cognitive associations.Easily formable associations with regular words would interfere with his results, so he used items that would later be called "nonsense syllables" (also known as the CVC trigram).A nonsense syllable is a consonant-vowel-consonant combination, where the consonant does not repeat and the syllable does not have prior meaning.