Exercise 1: Why Nonsense Syllables, Not Real Words — Possible Solution
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If Ebbinghaus had used real, familiar words instead, his memory
results would have been genuinely contaminated by a real, separate
factor his study wasn't trying to measure: how much prior exposure and
existing meaning each specific word already carried for him before the
experiment even began. A common, frequently-used real word is
naturally easier to recall not because of anything about memory's own
general decay process, but simply because it was already deeply
familiar and meaningful before the study started.

Nonsense syllables like DAX or YAT carry no real prior meaning or
familiarity at all - Ebbinghaus had never encountered them before
deliberately creating them for this specific purpose. This meant every
syllable started from the exact same real baseline of complete
unfamiliarity, letting him isolate and measure the process of forming
and then losing a genuinely NEW memory, uncontaminated by pre-existing
knowledge that might otherwise make some items easier to remember than
others for reasons that had nothing to do with memory's own general
decay pattern.

This design choice is itself a real, concrete instance of Chapter 1's
own "controlled studies" principle - isolating one specific real
variable (pure memory formation and decay) by removing a confounding
factor (differing prior familiarity) that would otherwise make the
results genuinely harder to interpret.

ANSWER: Real words would have been contaminated by each word's own
prior familiarity, making some easier to remember for reasons
unrelated to memory decay itself. Nonsense syllables gave every item
the same real baseline of complete unfamiliarity, letting Ebbinghaus
isolate pure memory formation and decay - a direct, concrete example
of Chapter 1's own controlled-study principle.

WHY THIS WORKS AS AN ANSWER
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This identifies the real confounding variable (prior word familiarity)
that nonsense syllables specifically eliminate, connecting the design
choice back to the controlled-study principle from Chapter 1.