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Description: In verbal short-term recall, factors related to long-term knowledge of the language have a large effect on the number of correctly recalled items and little or no impact on order recall. This is true for example, when the detailed effects of variables such as semantic category or long-term inter-item associations are examined. However, contrary to what might be expected based on these findings, Poirier, Saint-Aubin, Mair, Tehan, & Tolan, (2015) proposed an activation-based view of verbal short-term memory, where order recall relies on the level of activation within long-term lexico-semantic networks (hereafter ANet). Their proposal was supported by manipulations of semantic category and long-term inter-item associations. The present paper offers a critical test of some of the predictions derived from ANet. In three experiments, we manipulated the orthographic neighborhood of to-be-recalled items. The latter is a factor operating at the sublexical level; as such, it is much less likely than semantic relatedness to involve demand characteristics or grouping strategies. Results of the first two experiments revealed the pattern of item migrations predicted by ANet, with order errors increasing in expected ways when manipulations were thought to heighten activation levels. The third experiment however, clearly showed that migrations were more related to the similarity between the items than to activation. The results of all three studies were successfully modelled by calling upon the Revised Feature Model (Saint-Aubin et al., 2021), where retrieval heavily depends on the similarity of the cueing information and the to-be-recalled item relative to the similarity between the cue and competing retrieval candidates.