Recognition memory for elements of sentences

Abstract

Although several theoretical positions and a variety of empirical tasks indicate the importance of verbs to sentences, nouns are generally recalled and recognized better in memorial tasks. Three main models can be identified to explain this discrepancy ("Fillenbaum's paradox"). To try to resolve this paradox, several experiments explored the efficiency of various sentence elements as cues in recognition memory. In Experiment I, concreteness of the stimuli did not interact with the type of distractor; however, verb phrase changes were harder to recognize than noun phrase changes when synonym distractors were used. This result was replicated in a forced-choice recognition paradigm (Experiment II) and with whole sentences where the derivational similarity of verbs and nouns was controlled (Experiment IV). The effect could not be attributed to characteristics of the English language (Experiment III) or to superior memory for form information in nouns (Experiment V). The total results are interpreted as suggesting that subjects process different parts of a sentence to different semantic levels, with verbs receiving more semantic representation and nouns more orthographic or phonological representation. The results are taken as support for a "semantic encoding model" of Fillenbaum's paradox.