Sentence Retention and Transformation Theory
- 1 August 1968
- journal article
- research article
- Published by SAGE Publications in Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology
- Vol. 20 (3) , 265-272
- https://doi.org/10.1080/14640746808400160
Abstract
The number of words recalled in addition to a sentence can be used to measure the amount of space a sentence occupies in immediate memory. Generally an active sentence (K) requires less space in memory than a passive negative sentence (PN). But in the present experiments it was found that when subjects were presented with a block of sentences of only one syntactic form, there was no longer a difference in the amount of space needed to store K and PN sentences. However, the difference between K and PN reappeared when the tense of the verb in successive sentences was varied, even though the material was still presented in a block of either all K or all PN sentences. These results were interpreted as suggesting that subjects were remembering words and phrases from each sentence rather than deriving kernal strings and remembering transformation tags.Keywords
This publication has 11 references indexed in Scilit:
- Some conditions of the influence of syntactical structure on learning: Grammatical transformation, learning instructions, and “chunking”Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 1967
- Familiarity and Free RecallQuarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 1967
- Grammar and the recall of chains of verbal responsesJournal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 1967
- The verification of sentences: The effects of delay of evidence and sentence lengthJournal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 1966
- Grammatical transformations and sentence comprehension in childhood and adulthoodJournal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 1966
- The measurement of “adopted chunks” in free recall learningPsychonomic Science, 1966
- Grammatical structure and the immediate recall of english sentencesJournal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 1965
- A Chronometric Study of Some Relations between SentencesThe Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 1964
- Concurrent effects of contextual constraint and word frequency on immediate recall and learning of verbal material.Canadian Journal of Psychology / Revue canadienne de psychologie, 1962
- Syntactic StructuresPublished by Walter de Gruyter GmbH ,1957