The effect of field configuration copying on both fermion and fermion-antifermion pair correlation functions is studied in detail in a simple quantum-mechanical model. It is found that, with very few exceptions, the copying procedure results in a large correction to the corresponding effective masses. In particular, this correction leads to an oscillatory behavior of the effective masses, similar to that observed for mesons in recent lattice QCD calculations. It is argued that the copying technique is unlikely to be useful as a spectroscopic tool.