Short Term Retention of Sentences †

Abstract

A series of experiments was performed on the interaction between the short-term retention of sentences and of digits. In Experiment I a digit span method was used whereby subjects were presented with a sentence followed by a sequence of digits and were required either (a) to recall the sentence first and then the digits or (b) to recall the digits followed by the sentence. Under condition (a) prior recall of the sentence reduced the percentage of digit sequences correctly recalled, while under condition (b) retention of the sentence appeared to have no effect on digit recall. This last finding was confirmed in Experiment II, where the sentences varied both in grammatical complexity and length.

In Experiment III the effect of prior recall of a sentence on the recall of digits was found to depend on the type of sentence used. A correlation was observed between the size of this effect and the time taken to recall a sentence. The rate of forgetting suggested by this observation was comparable to that obtained in Experiment IV, where subjects performed an intervening task that did not involve immediate memory for sentences in the interval between the presentation and recall of a six-digit sequence.

It was concluded from these results that the short-term retention of sentences and of lists of items cannot be explained in terms of some general store of limited capacity.