The reading list.
- Mary C Potter & Linda Lombardi (1990), Regeneration in the short-term recall of sentences
- Linda Lombardi & Mary C Potter (1992), The regeneration of syntax in short term memory
- Mary C. Potter & Linda Lombardi (1997), Syntactic Priming in Immediate Recall of Sentences
They lend evidence to the idea that in immediate sentence recall, sentences are stored as unordered bags of words (=a conceptual representation) and regenerated on-the-fly, changing the syntax if necessary to add a word. Lure words (presented before recall, before/after original) appear more in listening than reading. The fact that the re-generated syntax is often close to the original would be due to syntactical priming (just due to perceiving the original sentence).
Discusses the involvement of attention and control in sentence recall: sentence recall works better when you can relate the meaning to long-term memories, and that's mandatory if recall is larger than the phonological loop.
Categorize the types of transformations that quotes undergo on the web. The high-level variation categories are: synonyms, co-reference, reformulation, spelling, determiners, conjugation, linking words, contractions, number, inversions. (Those are further subdivided.) The high-level deletion categories are: modality, modifiers, linking words, determiners, completives, enumerations, time expressions, repetitions, intensity. (Those are also subdivided.) The main content is summed up in tables 4 and 5.
The procedure typically involves the oral presentation of a list of related words (e.g. bed, rest, awake, tired, dream, wake, snooze, blanket, doze, slumber, snore, nap, peace, yawn, drowsy) and then requires the subject to remember as many words from the list as possible. Typical results show that subjects recall a related but nonpresented word (e.g. sleep), known as a ‘lure’, with the same frequency as other presented words.[1] When subjects are asked about their experience after the test, about half of all participants report that they are sure that they remember hearing the nonpresented word, indicating a false memory – memory for an event that never occurred.
Introduces a measure of order redundancy in word list recall, related to the entropy of the underlying markov process, called subjective organization. This increases with repeated trials (read/recall of the list in another order) and correlates to recall performance. There is also an intersubject correlation in the organization (which also increases with repeated trials).