The purpose of the present study was to investigate the effect of primary and secondary rehearsal duration on recall and recognition. In two experiments, primary reheasal and secondary rehearsal were separated by using directed forgetting paradigm and each rehearsal duration was manipulated. Subjects were shown four lists of words. Following each word there was a primary rehearsal interval ranging from 0 to 12 seconds. After this interval, the subjects were cued to either forget the word (F word) or to try to remember the word (R word), and then followed by a secondary rehearsal interval ranging also from 0 to 12 seconds. At the end of each list the subjects were asked to recall all of the R words, followed by a final recall and recognition of all the words at the end of the experiment. As a result, primary rehearsal duration did not facilitate any recall, but did a recognition. On the other hand, secondary rehearsal duration facilitated both recall and recognition. These results were interpreted as a recently proposed distinction between intra- and inter-item processing.