Memory for words

Abstract

LISTENERS do not ordinarily retain the syntax of a sentence for longer than is necessary to grasp its meaning; they rapidly forget both superficial ‘surface structure’ and underlying ‘deep structure’^1–3. What they retain is the sense of the sentence, evidently divorced from its syntax. It has been argued that this sense might consist of an associative structure linking representations of the words in the sentence⁴. Yet, if meaning is divorced from syntax, it might also be divorced from words. Indeed, we shall argue that a semantic representation need not incorporate any direct information about the lexical categories of words; it merely appears to do so because they can often be reconstructed from the meaning of a sentence. It follows, of course, that the specific wording of a sentence should ordinarily be rapidly forgotten⁵. One simple test of this hypothesis, avoiding the predictability of words from meaning, is to examine a person's ability to recollect whether a certain element of meaning was conveyed by a noun or a verb. (Does the reader recollect with any confidence whether, for example, we wrote earlier, “the divorce of meaning from syntax”, or “meaning is divorced from syntax”?) We predicted that information about lexical categories would tend to be forgotten if subjects were unaware that their memory for a sentence was to be tested, but that it would tend to be remembered if subjects expected their memory to be tested.