Sentence retention and transformation theory |
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Authors: | Patricia Wright |
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Institution: |
a M.R.C. Applied Psychology Research Unit, Cambridge, England |
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Abstract: | The number of words recalled in addition to a sentence can be used to measure the amount of space a sentence occupies in immediate memory. Generally an active sentence (K) requires less space in memory than a passive negative sentence (PN). But in the present experiments it was found that when subjects were presented with a block of sentences of only one syntactic form, there was no longer a difference in the amount of space needed to store K and PN sentences. However, the difference between K and PN reappeared when the tense of the verb in successive sentences was varied, even though the material was still presented in a block of either all K or all PN sentences.
These results were interpreted as suggesting that subjects were remembering words and phrases from each sentence rather than deriving kernal strings and remembering transformation tags. |
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