Evidence for a modality effect in sentence retention

It is well known that an acoustic-sensory code supports retention of linguistic materials whose storage is particularly based on phonological information (e.g., unrelated word lists). The present study investigates whether such a code also contributes to the retention of sentences. It has been shown that short-term sentence recall particularly depends on propositional and lexicosemantic information, which are assumed to be supplied independently of modality influences. We employed the intrusion paradigm of Potter and Lombardi (1990) and manipulated the availability of acoustic-sensory information. Participants were instructed to read sentences either silently or aloud. Since these two reading conditions also differ with respect to articulatory information, a further condition that provided articulatory but not acoustic-sensory information was introduced (i.e., silent mouthing). Our data suggest that acoustic-sensory information is used, if available, even in sentence recall.     

Immediate and delayed recall of visually presented sentences: evidence for the involvement of phonological information

The lure intrusion effect refers to the observation that lexical priming affects recall of sentences. This effect is taken as evidence against the contribution of surface information, even with immediate sentence recall. Recently, Rummer and Engelkamp (2003a) demonstrated that this effect, which is usually observed under rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP), does not appear under immediate recall of auditorily presented sentences. This finding indicates that surface information (i.e., phonological or acoustic-sensory information) can contribute to immediate sentence recall. So far, however, the findings do not allow for a decision on whether phonological and/or acoustic-sensory information is used in immediate sentence recall. In order to dissociate the two kinds of surface information, an experiment was conducted in which immediate and delayed recall were tested for sentences that were visually presented for a longer period of time than in RSVP. This kind of presentation should support phonological representations, but does not allow for acoustic-sensory representations. The findings showed a smaller intrusion effect for immediate than for delayed recall. This indicates that, if available, phonological information is involved in immediate sentence recall thereby reducing the lure intrusion effect. Furthermore, the findings support the assumption that the phonological trace provided via RSVP reading is weaker than in normal reading.     

Phonological information in immediate and delayed sentence recall

Potter and Lombardi (1990) state in their conceptual regeneration hypothesis that immediate sentence recall is only based on conceptual and lexical information; phonological information does not contribute. As experimental evidence for this hypothesis, they reported that if a sentence is followed by a word list that included a lure word similar to one of the content words of the sentence (target word), the lure word frequently intrudes into sentence recall. We demonstrated that Potter and Lombardi did not observe any influence of phonological information because list presentation followed sentence presentation, and phonological information was discarded. We observed that phonological information influenced the intrusion rate if recall was not delayed by the subsequent presentation of a word list. With immediate recall, the lure intrusion effect disappeared in auditorily presented sentences. This shows that, if available, phonological information contributes to sentence recall.     

Investigating the roles of phonological and semantic memory in sentence recall

The mechanisms underlying short-term sentence recall have been the subject of recent investigations. While both semantic and phonological information have been found to play a role in sentence recall, this has been established using different paradigms in previous research. As a result, it is not clear whether the contributions of semantic and phonological information are equivalent subject only to specific experimental conditions. The present study used a common paradigm with equally plausible lures to systematically compare the roles of semantic and phonological information in short-term sentence recall. The lure intrusion paradigm was used with three different lures that were all equally plausible in the context of the sentence: semantic, onset, and rhyme. Further, no contextual cues were provided in the sentence to bias the participant. The findings indicate that there were significantly more semantic and onset intrusions compared to rhyme intrusions. This is interpreted in light of models incorporating lexical information during sentence production.     

Investigating the roles of phonological and semantic memory in sentence recall

The mechanisms underlying short-term sentence recall have been the subject of recent investigations. While both semantic and phonological information have been found to play a role in sentence recall, this has been established using different paradigms in previous research. As a result, it is not clear whether the contributions of semantic and phonological information are equivalent subject only to specific experimental conditions. The present study used a common paradigm with equally plausible lures to systematically compare the roles of semantic and phonological information in short-term sentence recall. The lure intrusion paradigm was used with three different lures that were all equally plausible in the context of the sentence: semantic, onset, and rhyme. Further, no contextual cues were provided in the sentence to bias the participant. The findings indicate that there were significantly more semantic and onset intrusions compared to rhyme intrusions. This is interpreted in light of models incorporating lexical information during sentence production.     

Why is short-term sentence recall verbatim? An evaluation of the role of lexical priming

By showing that short-term sentence recall can be significantly affected by words encountered in an intervening distractor task, Potter and Lombardi (1990,Journal of Memory and Language, 29, 633–654) argue that short-term sentence recall is often verbatim because of the availability of recently activated lexical entries during the regeneration of the sentence from its conceptual representation. We show that similar effects can be obtained even when bilinguals perform an intervening task in a different language from that of sentence recall, or when monolinguals perform an intervening task upon pictures. Furthermore, we show that the presentation of a word in P&L’s distractor task does not, in any case, affect subsequent retrieval of a semantically related word as measured in a picture-naming task. We suggest that the effects on recall reported here and by P&L should be explained in terms of conceptual level interference at the time of recall. We also discuss the implications of our suggestion for the issue of the verbatimness of short-term sentence recall.     

The role of phonology in incidental vocabulary acquisition during silent reading

In two experiments, we investigated the role of phonology in learning new words incidentally during silent reading. Participants read sentence pairs containing novel or known words that varied in homophony (whether another word exists with an alternate spelling for the same pronunciation). In Experiment 1, we monitored readers' eye movements to investigate online processes involved in establishing meanings for novel words. In Experiment 2, participants completed cued recall and vocabulary recognition tasks after the reading session to assess the influence of phonological form on word learning. Eye movement results indicate that readers spent the most time reading novel homophones (e.g., skwosh) and surrounding context, indicating that phonological information is activated early during a reader's initial encounter with a new letter string. Retention measures suggest that readers were able to infer a meaning for each novel word type, despite the increased difficulty associated with reading novel words with familiar phonological forms, and that phonology aided the acquisition of orthography.     

What is the deficit in phonological processing deficits: auditory sensitivity, masking, or category formation?

Although children with language impairments, including those associated with reading, usually demonstrate deficits in phonological processing, there is minimal agreement as to the source of those deficits. This study examined two problems hypothesized to be possible sources: either poor auditory sensitivity to speech-relevant acoustic properties, mainly formant transitions, or enhanced masking of those properties. Adults and 8-year-olds with and without phonological processing deficits (PPD) participated. Children with PPD demonstrated weaker abilities than children with typical language development (TLD) in reading, sentence recall, and phonological awareness. Dependent measures were word recognition, discrimination of spectral glides, and phonetic judgments based on spectral and temporal cues. All tasks were conducted in quiet and in noise. Children with PPD showed neither poorer auditory sensitivity nor greater masking than adults and children with TLD, but they did demonstrate an unanticipated deficit in category formation for nonspeech sounds. These results suggest that these children may have an underlying deficit in perceptually organizing sensory information to form coherent categories.     

Speech timing and working memory in profoundly deaf children after cochlear implantation

Thirty-seven profoundly deaf children between 8- and 9-years-old with cochlear implants and a comparison group of normal-hearing children were studied to measure speaking rates, digit spans, and speech timing during digit span recall. The deaf children displayed longer sentence durations and pauses during recall and shorter digit spans compared to the normal-hearing children. Articulation rates, measured from sentence durations, were strongly correlated with immediate memory span in both normal-hearing and deaf children, indicating that both slower subvocal rehearsal and scanning processes may be factors that contribute to the deaf children's shorter digit spans. These findings demonstrate that subvocal verbal rehearsal speed and memory scanning processes are not only dependent on chronological age as suggested in earlier research by. Instead, in this clinical population the absence of early auditory experience and phonological processing activities before implantation appears to produce measurable effects on the working memory processes that rely on verbal rehearsal and serial scanning of phonological information in short-term memory.     

Horizontal information flow in spoken sentence production

In 4 experiments the authors used a variant of the picture-word interference paradigm to investigate whether there is a temporal overlap in the activation of words during sentence production and whether there is a flow of semantic and phonological information between them. Experiments 1 and 2 demonstrate that 2 semantically related nouns produce interference effects either when they are in the same or different phrases of a sentence. Experiments 3 and 4 demonstrate that 2 phonologically related nouns produce facilitation effects but only when they are within the same phrase of a sentence. The results argue against strictly serial models of multiple-word access and provide evidence of a flow of semantic and phonological information between words during sentence production.     

Is phonological short-term memory related to phonological analysis stages in auditory sentence processing?

Despite extensive research, the role of phonological short-term memory (STM) during oral sentence comprehension remains unclear. We tested the hypothesis that phonological STM is involved in phonological analysis stages of the incoming words, but not in sentence comprehension per se. We compared phonological STM capacity and processing times for natural sentences and sentences containing phonetically ambiguous words. The sentences were presented for an auditory sentence anomaly judgement task and processing times for each word were measured. STM was measured via nonword and word immediate serial recall tasks, indexing phonological and lexicosemantic STM capacity, respectively. Significantly increased processing times were observed for phonetically ambiguous words, relative to natural stimuli in same sentence positions. Phonological STM capacity correlated with the size of this phonetic ambiguity effect. However, phonological STM capacity did not correlate with measures of later semantic integration processes while lexicosemantic STM did. This study suggests that phonological STM is associated with phonological analysis processes during sentence processing.     

Building syntactic structures in speaking: a bilingual exploration

In a series of three experiments we investigated syntactic priming using a sentence recall task. Participants read and memorized a target sentence for later recall. After reading a prime sentence and engaging in a distraction task, they were asked to produce the target sentence aloud. Earlier investigations have shown that this task is sensitive to a syntactic priming effect. That is, the syntactic form of the prime sentence sometimes influences the syntactic form of the recalled target. In this paper we report on a variation on this task, using Spanish-English bilingual participants. In the first two experiments we replicated the prepositional phrase priming effect using English target sentences and Spanish prime sentences. In the final experiment we investigated two additional syntactic forms, using Spanish target sentences and English prime sentences. Implications for models of syntax generation and bilingual speech production are discussed.     

Phonological similarity neighborhoods and children’s short-term memory: Typical development and dyslexia

In this article, we explore whether structural characteristics of the phonological lexicon affect serial recall in typically developing and dyslexic children. Recent work has emphasized the importance of long-term phonological representations in supporting short-term memory performance. This occurs via redintegration (reconstruction) processes, which show significant neighborhood density effects in adults. We assessed whether serial recall in children was affected by neighborhood density in word and nonword tasks. Furthermore, we compared dyslexic children with typically developing children of the same age or reading level. Dyslexic children are held to have impaired phonological representations of lexical items. These impaired representations may impair or prevent the use of long-term phonological representations to redintegrate short-term memory traces. We report significant rime neighborhood density effects for serial recall of both words and nonwords, for both dyslexic and typically developing children.     

The interaction of multiple routes in oral reading: evidence from dissociations in naming and oral reading in phonological dyslexia

During oral reading we hypothesized that lexical representations are activated and selected for output by the simultaneous activation of the semantic, the direct lexical orthography to phonology, and the sublexical grapheme-to-phoneme conversion (GPC) routes (Southwood & Chatterjee, 1999). Serial models of reading argue that the semantic route governs oral reading with minimal influence from the nonlexical direct route and the sublexical GPC route. These models predict that semantic errors should occur in reading when the semantic route and GPC are both impaired. The Simultaneous Activation Hypothesis predicts few semantic errors in oral reading but many during picture naming. Semantic errors are infrequent in reading because information from all three reading routes constrains activation of a phonological entry. By contrast phonological selection in picture naming is constrained primarily by the semantic route and if damaged additional information is unavailable to select the appropriate phonological code. In agreement with the Simultaneous Activation Hypothesis five phonological dyslexics produced semantic errors during picture naming but not when reading aloud. Phonological errors were present during oral reading and minimal during picture naming.     

Children’s and adults’ use of spelling-sound information in three reading tasks

This research examined the effects of irregular spelling and irregular spelling-sound correspondences on word recognition in children and adults. Previous research has established that, among skilled readers, these irregularities influence the reading of only lower frequency words. However, this research involved the lexical decision and naming tasks, which differ from the demands of normal reading in important ways. In the present experiments, we compared performance on these tasks with that on a task requiring words to be recognized in sentence contexts. Results indicated that adults showed effects of spelling and spelling-sound irregularities in reading lower frequency words on all three tasks, whereas younger and poorer readers also showed effects on higher frequency words. The fact that irregular spelling-sound correspondences affected performance on the sentence task indicates that access of phonological information is not an artifact of having to read a word aloud or perform a lexical decision. Two other developmental trends were observed: As children became more skilled in reading, the effects of irregular spelling were overcome before the effects of irregular spelling-sound correspondences; the latter effects were eliminated on silent reading tasks earlier than on the naming task.     

The effect of concurrent semantic categorization on delayed serial recall

The influence of semantic processing on the serial ordering of items in short-term memory was explored using a novel dual-task paradigm. Participants engaged in 2 picture-judgment tasks while simultaneously performing delayed serial recall. List material varied in the presence of phonological overlap (Experiments 1 and 2) and in semantic content (concrete words in Experiment 1 and 3; nonwords in Experiments 2 and 3). Picture judgments varied in the extent to which they required accessing visual semantic information (i.e., semantic categorization and line orientation judgments). Results showed that, relative to line-orientation judgments, engaging in semantic categorization judgments increased the proportion of item-ordering errors for concrete lists but did not affect error proportions for nonword lists. Furthermore, although more ordering errors were observed for phonologically similar relative to dissimilar lists, no interactions were observed between the phonological overlap and picture-judgment task manipulations. These results demonstrate that lexical-semantic representations can affect the serial ordering of items in short-term memory. Furthermore, the dual-task paradigm provides a new method for examining when and how semantic representations affect memory performance.     

Phonological similarity in working memory

That phonologically similar words in a short-term memory test are more difficult to recall than phonologically dissimilar words is a well-known phenomenon. This effect is the phonological similarity decrement. In the present study, we examined whether this phonological similarity decrement is present when additional semantic information is available, as in a reading span test, as compared with a standard presentation, or in the context of an operation span test. The results revealed a phonological similarity facilitation. Phonologically similar words were remembered better than phonologically dissimilar words.     

Determinants of Short-term Forgetting: Decay,Retroactive Interference,or Proactive Interference?

In two experiments short-term forgetting was investigated in a short-term cued recall task designed to examine proactive interference effects. Mixed modality study lists were tested at varying retention intervals using verbal and nonverbal distractor activities. When an interfering foil was read aloud and a target item read silently, strong PI effects were observed for both types of distractor activity. When the target was read aloud and followed by a verbal distractor activity, weak PI effects emerged. However, when a target item was read aloud and nonverbal distractor activity filled the retention interval, performance was immune to the effects of PI for at least 8 seconds. The results indicate that phonological representations of items read aloud still influence performance after 15 seconds of distractor activity.     

"The W and M are mixing me up": use of a visual code in verbal short-term memory tasks

When normal participants are presented with written verbal short-term memory tasks (e.g., remembering a set of letters for immediate spoken recall) there is evidence to suggest that the information is re-coded into phonological form. This paper presents a single case study of MJK whose reading follows the pattern of phonological dyslexia. In short-term memory tasks MJK does not phonologically re-code written materials but, it is argued, uses a visual code. There are three main lines of evidence for this, (a) MJK tends to substitute visually similar items for one another, (b) her performance is better with visual than auditory stimuli, and (c) she is able to remember numbers (e.g., 8) better than written words (e.g., eight). Investigation of short-term memory in others with phonological dyslexia is warranted.     

Overwriting of phonemic features in serial recall

We tested two explanations of the phonological similarity effect in verbal short-term memory: The confusion hypothesis assumes that serial positions of similar items are confused. The overwriting hypothesis states that similar items share feature representations, which are overwritten. Participants memorised a phonologically dissimilar list of CVC-trigrams (Experiment 1) or words (Experiment 2 and 3) for serial recall. In the retention interval they read aloud other items. The material of the distractor task jointly overlapped one item of the memory list. The recall of this item was impaired, and the effect was not based on intrusions from the distractor task alone. The results provide evidence for feature overwriting as one potential mechanism contributing to the phonological similarity effect.