Long-term recognition memory for sentences

The present studies examined immediate and one-week delayed recognition performance for active and passive sentences. Recognition tests included distractor sentences wherein the logical subject, verb, of logical object of a sentence was replaced by a semantically confusable, visually confusable, or unrelated distractor. Results indicated that logical subjects, verbs, and logical objects of sentences were recognized equally well during immediate testing. During delayed testing, changes in the logical object or recipient of the action were not detected as well as verb changes of logical subject changes. The implications of these results for current sentence memory models were discussed.