The Course of Representation in Memory During the Comprehension of Paragraphs

Abstract

The course of the representation built in memory from a text during comprehension of paragraphs was studied by a probe technique (immediate item recognition). Three experiments showed that response times, the main variable, gradually increase as a function of the lag between the probe (a word or an atomic proposition) and its target in the text. In Experiment 3 the same result was also found with a priming technique. The absence of any kick‐up over the course of time was confirmed by several additional analyses of individual data. The results were only weakly consistent with models assuming two distinct memory stores, in particular a specific “short‐term memory store,” but highly consistent with models involving semantic activation and subsequent gradual deactivation.