Regeneration in the short-term recall of sentences

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Abstract

Verbatim short-term memory for a sentence has been taken as evidence for a surface representation different from the conceptual representation characteristic of longer-term memory. In seven experiments we investigated an alternative hypothesis: that immediate recall involves regeneration of the sentence from a conceptual representation, using words that have been recently activated. A key claim is that the activated lexical items are unordered. To test this hypothesis, a synonym of a word in the sentence was presented in a secondary task before or after the sentence, prior to recall. As predicted, these lure words were intruded frequently (Experiments 1 and 2), but only when supported by the meaning of the whole sentence (Experiments 3 and 4). In Experiment 5 as high an intrusion rate was obtained for sentences read in RSVP at 100 ms per word as at the 200 ms rate of the other experiments. Experiment 6 showed that listeners make even more lure-based intrusions than readers. In Experiment 7 4-year-old children made intrusions similar to those of adults. The results support the hypothesis that a sentence is regenerated in immediate recall from a representation of its meaning, using recently activated words. Only when the right set of words is active will recall be “verbatim.”

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  • Cited by (0)

    The present research was supported by National Science Foundation Grants BNS-8318156 and BNS-8619053 to Mary C. Potter. Some of the work was reported previously at the 1985 meeting of the Psychonomic Society and at the 1989 Sylvia Beach Language Comprehension Conference.

    1

    Linda Lombardi is now at the Department of Linguistics, University of Massachusetts.

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