Performance structures in the recall of sentences

Two experiments were conducted to ascertain whether subjects’ recall of sentences reflects more closely their surface structure, as Johnson (1965, 1969) and others have predicted, or their performance structure, as Grosjean, Grosjean, and Lane (1979) have proposed. The results clearly show that, as for pausing and parsing, transitional error probability (TEP) in the rote recall of sentences reflects the product of two, sometimes conflicting, demands on processing: the need to respect the linguistic surface structure of the sentence and the need to balance the length of the constituents. The structures obtained from TEPs were similar to those obtained from other tasks (pausing and parsing), showing that performance structures are not task specific. In addition, the presence of deletable elements in the sentences (such as adjectives and adverbs) was closely associated with high TEPs.