The role of imagery in recognition memory for sentences

The effects of sentence imageability were examined in a test of continuous recognition memory following meaningful orienting tasks which emphasized verbal or imagery encoding. The results showed that distractors changed in syntactic form were more accurately identified for abstract than for concrete sentences, while memory for meaning was equally accurate for both sentence types. The orienting task manipulation did not affect this pattern of results. These data extend previous reports (Begg and Paivio 1969) by demonstrating qualitative differences in memory for concrete and abstract sentences when full comprehension of the stimulus material is required. The results are consistent with the dual coding hypothesis (Paivio 1971) but not with propositional models of memory (Anderson and Bower 1973).