[Phonological information in short-term memory of sentences]

Potter and Lombardi (1990) showed that words that are semantically similar to nouns of auditorily or visually presented sentences intrude into sentence recall if presented in an unrelated word list (given either before or after the sentence). The authors interpreted this finding in terms of the conceptual regeneration hypothesis. This hypothesis states that sentence recall is based on conceptual information whereas the role of phonological information is negligible. However, this general interpretation is questionable. In order to demonstrate the involvement of phonological information in sentence recall, we used Potter and Lombardi's intrusion paradigm. Participants were either presented with auditory or visual material. With respect to visual presentations we used two conditions: a rapid presentation rate (rapid serial visual presentation, RSVP) and a slow presentation rate. Under all conditions the word list was presented before the sentence. The intrusion effect was only found for RSVP but not for the slow conditions. This finding provides evidence for the assumption that phonological information generally plays an important role in short-term sentence recall.