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.     

Short-term sentence recall: evidence for the contribution of acoustic-sensory information

To demonstrate that short-term sentence recall is based on conceptual and lexico-semantic information, Potter and Lombardi [J. Memory Lang. 29 (1990) 633] conducted a series of experiments using the intrusion paradigm, which combines short-term sentence recall and lexical priming. In the present paper, we employed the intrusion paradigm to demonstrate that acoustic-sensory information is involved in sentence regeneration as well. For this purpose, we presented sentences visually for silent reading (conceptual and phonological information) and reading aloud (conceptual, phonological, and--in addition--acoustic-sensory information). We demonstrated that less intrusions appeared in the reading aloud condition. This effect supports the assumption that, if available, acoustic-sensory information contributes to the regeneration process.     

Memory for non-native language: The role of lexical processing in the retention of surface form

Research on memory for native language (L1) has consistently shown that retention of surface form is inferior to that of gist (e.g., Sachs, 1967). This paper investigates whether the same pattern is found in memory for non-native language (L2). We apply a model of bilingual word processing to more complex linguistic structures and predict that memory for L2 sentences ought to contain more surface information than L1 sentences. Native and non-native speakers of English were tested on a set of sentence pairs with different surface forms but the same meaning (e.g., “The bullet hit/struck the bull's eye”). Memory for these sentences was assessed with a cued recall procedure. Responses showed that native and non-native speakers did not differ in the accuracy of gist-based recall but that non-native speakers outperformed native speakers in the retention of surface form. The results suggest that L2 processing involves more intensive encoding of lexical level information than L1 processing.     

Partial picture effects on children's memory for sentences containing implicit information

Two experiments were conducted examining the effects of partial picture adjuncts on young children's coding of information that was implied in sentences. In the two most critical conditions of these studies, subjects were presented sentences specifying a subject, an action, and a direct object with the instrument used to carry out the action not specified in the sentence (e.g., The workman dug a hole in the ground). Implicit-sentence-only subjects received only the sentences, whereas the implicit sentence + partial picture subjects also viewed a partial picture depicting the action in the sentence minus the implied instrument. The main hypothesis was that subsequent recall of the sentences given the implied instrument as a cue would be facilitated by the partial pictures provided at study, since they would lead the children to infer the instrument. That occurred with 6- to 7-year-old children, but not with preschool children. Consistent with the conclusion that the partial pictures prompted 6- to 7-year-olds to infer the instruments, implicit sentence + partial picture subjects recalled as much as subjects in two other conditions, one in which subjects were explicitly told the instruments at study and one in which subjects saw the instruments depicted in pictures at study. In contrast, preschool subjects who heard explicit sentences containing the instruments outperformed subjects who heard implicit sentences even when the implicit sentences were accompanied by pictures depicting the instruments. This failure of complete pictures to facilitate preschoolers' recall of information implied in sentences contrasts with the many demonstrations of prose learning facilitation when picture and sentence contents explicitly and completely overlap. In summary, there were developmental differences in whether (a) partial pictures significantly facilitated inferencing (and subsequent cued recall) and (b) complete pictures containing information not explicitly stated in sentences promoted cued recall of the sentences.     

Semantic binding,not attentional control,generates coherent global structure in children's narrative memory

Encoding and retrieving global narrative structure influences children's narrative recall. The influence of age and attentional/executive resources on binding processes during sentence list recall was examined in 5- to 6- and 8- to 9-year-old children. Older and younger children showed superior recall of lists, and achieved higher scores on two metrics of chunking; access to different sentences (i.e., number of chunks) and sentence completion (i.e., chunk size), when lists were presented within a coherent global structure. Children's list recall and sentence access, but not their sentence completion scores, were affected by a concurrent self-paced attention-demanding task. Children, unlike adults, engage in active storage of verbal information in thematically related sentence lists. The coherence-advantage effect was stable across age groups and insensitive to the secondary task. Overall, findings imply that semantic binding generates stronger memory representations and superior recall for sentences within a story context than for sentence sets that lack global narrative structure.     

Short term retention of sentences

A series of experiments was performed on the interaction between the short-term retention of sentences and of digits. In Experiment I a digit span method was used whereby subjects were presented with a sentence followed by a sequence of digits and were required either (a) to recall the sentence first and then the digits or (b) to recall the digits followed by the sentence. Under condition (a) prior recall of the sentence reduced the percentage of digit sequences correctly recalled, while under condition (b) retention of the sentence appeared to have no effect on digit recall. This last finding was confirmed in Experiment II, where the sentences varied both in grammatical complexity and length.

In Experiment III the effect of prior recall of a sentence on the recall of digits was found to depend on the type of sentence used. A correlation was observed between the size of this effect and the time taken to recall a sentence. The rate of forgetting suggested by this observation was comparable to that obtained in Experiment IV, where subjects performed an intervening task that did not involve immediate memory for sentences in the interval between the presentation and recall of a six-digit sequence.

It was concluded from these results that the short-term retention of sentences and of lists of items cannot be explained in terms of some general store of limited capacity.     

Repetition deficits, list context, and word-class interactions in the RSVP of words in sentences.

We report a failure to find a repetition deficit in recall following the rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) of words within sentences, using adjectives rather than nouns as the critical items. In a series of experiments that ruled out participant and procedural differences as the source of the failure, both word class and list context were found to moderate the repetition deficit, but grammatical necessity did not. The presence in the list of sentences in which the repeated adjectives were separated by more than three words (i.e., more than 400 ms in RSVP) not only eliminated the repetition deficit for the recall of those sentences but also for the recall of sentences in which the repeated adjectives were separated by three or fewer words (i.e., less than 400 ms in RSVP). However, although substantially reduced, a repetition deficit with noun-based materials was still found in this list context. Matching the adjective-based sentences with the noun-based sentences in sentence length and position of the critical items revealed that the moderating effect of word-class on the repetition deficit was mediated by the biases in sentence structure that using different word classes tend to induce.     

Word associations are formed incidentally during sentential semantic integration

Sentential context facilitates the incidental formation of word associations (e.g., Prior, A., & Bentin, S. (2003). Incidental formation of episodic associations: the importance of sentential context. Memory and Cognition, 31(2), 306-316). The present study explored the mechanism of this effect. In two experiments, unrelated word pairs were embedded in coherent or semantically anomalous sentences. Anomalous sentences included either a local or a global anomaly. During an incidental study phase, participants performed a sentence categorization task. The strength of the incidental associations formed between two nouns jointly appearing in a sentence was probed by gauging their influence on subsequent paired-associate learning and cued recall in Experiment 1, and by assessing their associative priming effect in a subsequent unexpected explicit recognition test for single words in Experiment 2. In both experiments, significant associative memory was found for noun pairs studied in coherent sentences but not for those appearing in anomalous sentences, regardless of anomaly type. In a sentence rating task, global anomalies yielded less plausible sentences than local anomalies, however both types of anomalies were equally detrimental to the sentence integration process. We suggest that sentence constituents are incidentally associated during sentence processing, particularly as a result of sentence integration and the consolidation of a mental model.     

Effects of sentence importance on text recall and recognition: The inferential hypothesis

Abstract

The hypothesis that sentences with important information are more likely to be remembered than less important sentences because the former are inferred to a greater extent than the latter, was explored. In three previous studies, sentence importance in the structure of texts had been established: Main sentences were assigned higher importance ratings, and recalled and recognised better than secondary sentences. In the present experiment, the subjects read two out of six 500-word texts at their own pace and performed a recall or a recognition test 8 min and 7 days later. Different text versions were written; in each version, one main sentence and one secondary sentence were removed from the original texts. me results showed: (1) a higher false alarm rate and intrusion proportion for main sentences compared to secondary sentences; (2) superior net recall scores (after deduction of intrusions) and memory scores (after correction for guessing) for main sentences; but (3) equivalent net recognition scores (after deduction of false alarms) and discrimination (d') scores in the immediate test, and a superior net recognition and discrimination of secondary sentences in the delayed test. It is concluded that the inferential hypothesis is consistent with most of the results, and that the probability of coding and retention does not differ as a function of sentence importance, though main information may be retrieved more easily than less important information.     

Two modality effects in verbal short-term memory: Evidence from sentence recall

This paper investigates the mechanisms underlying the standard modality effect (i.e., better recall performance for auditorily presented than for visually presented materials), and the modality congruency effect (i.e., better memory performance if the mode of recall and presentation are congruent rather than incongruent). We tested the assumption that the standard modality effect is restricted to the most recent word(s) of the sentences but occurs in both verbatim and gist recall (Experiments 1 and 2), whereas the modality congruency effect should be evident for the rest of the sentence when using verbatim recall (Experiment 3) but not when using gist recall (Experiment 4). All experiments used the Potter-Lombardi intrusion paradigm. When the target word was the most recent word of the sentence, a standard modality effect was found with both verbatim recall and gist recall. When the target word was included in the middle of the sentences, a modality congruency effect was found with verbatim recall but not with gist recall.     

Visual similarity effects in immediate verbal serial recall

The role of visual working memory in temporary serial retention of verbal information was examined in four experiments on immediate serial recall of words that varied in visual similarity and letters that varied in the visual consistency between upper and lower case. Experiments 1 and 2 involved words that were either visually similar (e.g. fly, cry, dry; hew, new, few ) or were visually distinct (e.g. guy, sigh, lie; who, blue, ewe ). Experiments 3 and 4 involved serial recall of both letter and case from sequences of letters chosen such that the upper- and lower-case versions were visually similar, for example Kk, Cc, Zz, Ww , or were visually dissimilar, for example Dd, Hh, Rr, Qq . Hence in the latter set, case informationwas encoded interms of both the shape and the size of the letters. With both words and letters, the visually similar items resulted in poorer recall both with and without concurrent articulatory suppression. This visual similarity effect was robust and was replicated across the four experiments. The effect was not restricted to any particular serial position and was particularly salient in the recall of letter case. These data suggest the presence of a visual code for retention of visually presented verbal sequences in addition to a phonological code, and they are consistent with the use of a visual temporary memory, or visual "cache", in verbal serial recall tasks.     

Listening while talking: The retention of prose under articulatory suppression in relation to simultaneous interpreting

According to working memory theory (e.g., Baddeley & Logie, 1999) articulatory suppression (AS) prevents rehearsal in the articulatory loop of to be remembered material, which, in turn, has a disruptive effect on recall. Simultaneous interpreting is an activity where people routinely comprehend and maintain speech while articulating at the same time. We examined whether AS also affects retention when, as in interpreting, coherent text is to be remembered or meaningful and phonologically more complex material is articulated. In the first part of the study, participants listened to a set of stories, and were involved in traditional or complex AS. Also coherence of the texts was manipulated. We found that the effects of AS generalises to stories, that coherence influences recall and that both variables interact. In the second part, we related individual differences in retention under conditions of AS to simultaneous interpreting performance. The results are discussed in terms of the episodic buffer component (e.g., Baddeley, 2000).     

Picture versus question elaboration on young children's learning of sentences containing high- and low-probability content

The main purpose of the two experiments reported here was to compare the potency of two types of elaboration on children's learning of sentence content: The effects of partial picture adjuncts were compared to the effects produced by answering "why"-questions about the relationships specified in the sentences. Five- to seven-year-old children heard sentences of the form, subject/verb/direct object/preposition/instrument. Sentences contained either a high-probability or a low-probability instrument given the semantic context. In Experiment 1, sentences either were accompanied by a partial picture depicting the sentence action but omitting the instrument or were presented without a partial picture accompaniment. Recall was improved by provision of partial pictures at study. In Experiment 2, the sentences were accompanied by complete pictures depicting the sentence content. In both experiments, questioning significantly reduced recall of high-probability sentences, with recall of instruments affected especially negatively. Evidence is presented that insufficient attention to instruments may have been one mechanism mediating depressed recall of high- compared to low-probability instruments in the questioned conditions. In summary, partial pictures improved cued recall of sentences in this study; in contrast, all significant effects produced by answering why-questions were negative ones (i.e., later recall was reduced following interrogation at study).     

Tests of a holistic chunking model of sentence memory through analyses of noun intrusions

A holistic chunking model of sentence acquisition and retrieval is described and tested by a prompted sentence recall procedure. In this procedure, subjects first study a list of unrelated sentences and later receive single-word prompts to cue sentence recall. The model assumes that (1) words in sentences are grouped into propositions during acquisition, (2) the propositions are encoded holistically and later retrieved as units, and (3) the retrieval of one proposition does not automatically lead to recovery of other propositions in a sentence. The model was tested by patterns of intrusion errors. Noun intrusions for elements within a recovered proposition were always related conceptually to the presented nouns, even when a noun violated the co-occurrence restrictions of the verb (e.g., the tray loved the house). In contrast, noun intrusions for elements outside of the scope of a recovered proposition were often unrelated to presented nouns. It was argued that patterns of intrusion errors provide more appropriate tests for sentence structure than do quantitative patterns of correct recall, at least from the framework of the holistic chunking model.     

The effect of non-verbal information on the recall of negation

The influence of non-verbal information on storage of different versions of negated sentences was investigated in a one-trial learning experiment. The negation governed either the subject, the object, or the predicate of the sentence. One group was presented with the sentences together with pictures. Another group the sentences only. The picture which was shown with a sentence represented the sentence content with an alternative for the negated concept. It was found that pictorial information had an effect on the recall of the sentences and that this effect is different for the different sentence versions.     

The effects of “effort after meaning” on recall: Differences in within- and between-subjects designs

In four experiments, we examined free recall of ambiguous sentences with or without corresponding cues to facilitate comprehension, using Auble and Franks’s (1978) paradigm to examine effort after meaning (Bartlett, 1932). The ambiguous sentences were studied without cues, with cues meaningfully embedded in them, with cues provided shortly before the sentence (precue), or with cues following the sentence after several seconds (delayed cue). When these conditions were manipulated within subjects, the process of cue integration in the pre- and delayed-cue conditions enhanced recall, relative to the no-cue and embedded-cue conditions. Furthermore, in a test condition in which subjects first attempted to recall the cues alone, recall was also best in the delayed-cue condition. The effects described above did not occur when the cue presentation conditions varied between subjects, and on a test of order reconstruction, there was even an advantage for sentences studied in the embedded-cue condition over those studied in the delayed-cue condition. The dissociative effects of experimental design on sentence recall and order reconstruction suggest that effort after meaning might enhance memory for study items at the cost of impairing memory for temporal order information.     

The bizarre mnemonic

Summary Five experiments measured effects of bizarre contexts on the free recall of noun triplets after brief retention intervals. More triplets were remembered from bizarre than from common contexts in short mixed lists (12 sentences) when the sentences were presented at a controlled (10 seconds/sentence) rate, regardless of incidental task (rating images for bizarreness, vividness, or memorability). The average number of words/sentence recalled, however, tended to be higher for common than for bizarre contexts. No memory benefit from bizarreness was found for pure lists nor for lists containing more than six triplets in bizarre contexts. The bizarreness effect was less when the subject controlled the rate of presentation. A sixth experiment, which tested recall after immediate and two-day retention intervals, found that the Bizarre/Common Context by Pure/Mixed List interaction increased over longer retention intervals.     

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.     

Memory for general and specific sentences

Cued recall indicated that memory was better for sentences containing specific verbs (e.g., scratched) than for sentences containing general verbs (e.g., injured). When synonymic verb responses were included, however, the general-specific difference was eliminated. Also, for complete sentence recall, subject nouns were better retrieval cues than verbs or object nouns. nt]mis|This research was supported by National Science Foundation Research Grant GB-22664 to L. Starling Reid and by a grant to the author from the Denison University Faculty Development Activities Program. Thanks are due Bill Stehle and Larry Giordano, who assisted in data collection and analysis.