Phonological Information Contributes to Short-Term Recall of Auditorily Presented Sentences

Abstract

Potter and Lombardi (1990) suggested that verbatim short-term recall of sentences solely depends on conceptual and lexical information. In two experiments, we show that phonological information also contributes to short-term sentence recall. Modality of sentence presentation was varied, and a word list was presented before or after sentence presentation. It was assumed that phonological information contributes to the recall of auditorily presented sentences but not to sentences presented under rapid serial visual presentation. Therefore, better recall was expected for auditory than for visual sentence presentation. However, the advantage of auditory presentation should only appear if the word list preceded the sentences and did not interfere with phonological sentence information. Thus, word-list position should influence recall after auditory but not after visual sentence presentation, as in the latter case the impact of phonological information should be greatly reduced. The predictions were clearly confirmed. In addition, we replicated Potter and Lombardi's (1990) conceptually motivated intrusion effect.