Short-term sentence recall: evidence for the contribution of acoustic-sensory information.

To demonstrate that short-term sentence recall is based on conceptual and lexico-semantic information, Potter and Lombardi [J. Memory Lang. 29 (1990) 633] conducted a series of experiments using the intrusion paradigm, which combines short-term sentence recall and lexical priming. In the present paper, we employed the intrusion paradigm to demonstrate that acoustic-sensory information is involved in sentence regeneration as well. For this purpose, we presented sentences visually for silent reading (conceptual and phonological information) and reading aloud (conceptual, phonological, and--in addition--acoustic-sensory information). We demonstrated that less intrusions appeared in the reading aloud condition. This effect supports the assumption that, if available, acoustic-sensory information contributes to the regeneration process.