THE REGENERATION OF SYNTAX IN SHORT-TERM-MEMORY

Immediate recall of a sentence is normally highly accurate. Previous work (Potter & Lombardi, 1990) has suggested that this accuracy is not due to a surface ("verbatim") representation of the string of words, but to regeneration of the sentence from a conceptual representation, using activated lexical entries. The present study tests an extension of that hypothesis: that the surface syntax of the to-be-recalled sentence is not directly represented in memory, but is regenerated using normal mechanisms of sentence production. In Experiments 1 and 2, induced intrusions of verbs were not prevented by incompatibility between the surface syntax of the original sentence and the subcategorization requirements of the intruded verb. In Experiments 3 and 4 subjects judged whether a probe verb could replace a verb in the to-be-recalled sentence; again, subjects had difficulty rejecting verbs on the basis of surface syntactic incompatibilities. In all four experiments subjects who recalled a sentence with a syntactically mismatched verb usually made syntactic changes that restored grammaticality. The results support an extension of the regeneration hypothesis: In regenerating a sentence from its conceptual representation the selection of the verb determines the syntactic structure of the sentence. When more than one structure is compatible with the conceptual representation and with the chosen verb, a structure that has been recently activated is likely to be reused. © 1992.