A short-term memory (STM) version of the Deese/Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm was employed to investigate how true and false recognition evolved as STM contents were lost over a short time-window immediately after initial encoding. Presentation of six-word DRM lists were followed by list-specific recognition tests applied either immediately or after a distractor-filled retention interval of 3, 9, or 27 s. Results showed that the probability of true recognition decreased, and the probability of false recognition increased as the retention interval grew longer. Based on the fuzzy-trace theory, we suggest that this pattern emerged from the different durability in STM of item-specific phonological representations, which would play the dual role of supporting true memory and preventing false recognition, and integrative semantic representations, whose overlap with the critical items would give rise to the DRM illusion.