Individual differences in the representation of sentences in memory

A cued recall procedure was used to assess the nature of the memory representation that underlies the ability of mentally retarded and nonretarded individuals to remember single sentences. Mentally retarded, equal-CA, and equal-MA subjects listened to a list of sentences after which their ability to recall the object noun of the sentence was assessed when they were provided recall cues that contained (a) only the subject noun of the original sentence, (b) only the verb of the sentence, or (c) both the subject and verb. As expected, performance for all groups was best when they were provided the subject plus verb cue relative to the single word cues. In addition, the groups differed in the magnitude of this two-word cue advantage, with the retarded subjects exhibiting the smallest and the equal-CA subjects exhibiting the largest advantage. This finding reflects a difference in the degree to which mentally retarded and nonretarded individuals construct sentence representations that more precisely specify the meaning of the sentence through the integration of its constituents.