The purpose of this study was to investigate the role of overt rehearsal in immediate and delayed recognition for preschoolers in relation to phonological and semantic encoding using the false recognition paradigm. Thirty-two children of five years old were asked to study 2 lists of 7 words presented auditorily, with rehearsing overtly or covertly. Following each study list, they were immediately given the recognition lists including distractors, which were phonologically similar or semantically related to the old items. And the delayed recognition test was conducted 2 days after. The results revealed that overt rehearsal seemed to enhance the subjects' performance for the lists including phonologically similar distractors, only in the immediate recognition but not in the delayed test.It was also indicated that, contrary to our expectation, semantic encoding was not inhibited by overt rehearsal. The subjects who had rehearsed the presented stimuli overtly, could not reject semantically related distractors adequately, suggesting that such a semantic encoding was also facilitated to some extent. These findings were discussed with reference to developmental shifts of memory attributes.