The purpose of this experiment is to investigate the effects of shadowing on selective attention and to specify the properties of echoic memory-auditory buffer storage. 24 students at Kyoto University participated in the dichotic listening experiment. In order to control the subjects' attention, a cueing technique was developed in which a prestimulus cue showed the to-be-attended channel and a poststimulus cue the report channel, In addition, half of the subjects were required to shadow the attended message. The prominent feature of the present procedure is that the recall of the unattended items could be obtained without the attended counterparts on that trial. The results showed that the shadowing task made it difficult for the subjects to report the unattended message and it seemed to involve more analytic verbal processing. The results were discussed in favor of an interpretation that the unattended message was stored in echoic memory prior to the stage of short term memory. Accordingly, the recency effect found in the serial position curve for the unattended items was interpreted to reflect the nature of echoic memory.