Semantic and phonological information in sentence recall: converging psycholinguistic and neuropsychological evidence

We present one experiment and a neuropsychological case study to investigate to what extent phonological and semantic representations contribute to short-term sentence recall. We modified Potter and Lombardi's (1990) intrusion paradigm, in which retention of a list interferes with sentence recall such that on the list a semantically related lure is presented, which is expected to intrude into sentence recall. In our version, lure words are either semantically related to target words in the sentence or semantically plus phonologically related. With healthy participants, intrusions are more frequent when lure and target overlap phonologically in addition to semantically than when they solely overlap semantically. When this paradigm is applied to a patient with a phonological short-term memory impairment, both lure types induce the same amount of intrusions. These findings indicate that usually phonological information is retained in sentence recall in addition to semantic information.