This report reviews the psychological and psycholinguistic literature from the last decade that deals with memory for sentences. It is concluded that the encoded representation of a sentence reflects both syntactic and semantic content, with the semantic content being far less transient. (Author)

Experimental hypotheses are proposed which assert (1) that "thought" and "language" are distinct but both are part of linguistic performance; (2) that "thought" is central, and "language" is a symbolic system that one uses to refer in various ways to what he thinks; and (3) that immediate memory works with utterances and linguistic texts over a…

The contrasting views of Saussure and Bloomfield ("mentalist" versus "mechanist"), the hypotheses of Whorf showing the influence of language on certain habits of thought, and Chomsky's notion of generative transformational grammar in the context of language use are reviewed. The author notes the limits of these systems and suggests that in dealing…

This paper reports on the results of several experiments concerned with instructions to forget certain information and to remember other information presented in the context of a variety of laboratory tasks of short-term memory. Assessment of the retention of remember material indicated that it varies directly with the degree to which clear…

This study used five cueing systems composed of 16 cues each in combination with three topical areas to form cue-topic pairs which acted as stimulus items for the retrieval of naturally stored information. The five cue systems were composed of: randomly selected words, randomly selected nouns, the Wilson and Arnold system, a modification of the…

This study investigated the facilitative effects of the loci system using mental imagery for acquisition and recall within a retroactive inhibition (RI) paradigm. Fifty-five college undergraduates were randomly assigned to five treatment conditions. Four groups formed cells in a 2x2 factorial design which included (1) an RI factor (AB-AD vs.…

The experiments discussed in this report do not have a direct relationship to each other but represent work on a series of sub-issues within the general framework of visual processing of information. Because of this discreteness, the report is organized into a series of papers. The first is a general review of tachistoscopic work on iconic memory…

The question of how people learn and remember information from complex written materials is explored by means of Grime's semantic grammar of propositions and the author's analysis of the content structure of prose. This paper, presented at the 1973 Interdisciplinary Meeting on Structural Learning, first discusses such elements of the semantic…

The present study attempted to identify and describe individual differences in concept learning. It was hypothesized that if a significant portion of the reliable individual variation in a complex learning situation could be identified and described, it would be reasonable to expect that subsequent predictions could be made about the conditions…

The author's stated purpose is to convince the reader that there is practical and theoretical importance in a general principle whereby the greater the amount of interference present during the initial learning of a particular task, the better the subsequent retention to new situations. The author attempts to convince the reader with empirical…

Three experiments investigated the hypothesis that, when interpreted in context, general terms are typically encoded on the basis of an instantiation. The results indicated that a particular term naming the expected instantiation of a general term was a better cue for the recall of a sentence than the general term itself, even though the general…

Subjects (N=43) aged 50 and more were tested on a Sternberg recognition-memory task to explore the relative effects of depression and altered brain function on short-term memory in later life. Many performance differnces were best accounted for by the additive effects of depression and educational background, rather than by either variable…

A study is reported in which short-term memory capacity, estimated by a probe digit task, and memory for structured language, measured by a probe discourse task, were investigated in an experiment with third and fifth grade IQ-matched children representing two levels of reading comprehension skill. (Author/RM)

The author attempts to obtain some new evidence on simple addition processes in adults in order to evaluate the two additon models offered by Groen and Parkman (1972); a simple counting model and a more complex retrieval model, involving direct access and counting. (Author/RK)

Rote, repetitive Type I Rehearsal is defined as the continuous maintenance of information in memory using the minimum cognitive capacity necessary for maintenance. An analysis of errors made on a forced-choice recognition test supported the hypothesis that acoustic-phonemic components of the memory trace are added or strengthened by this…