How quickly does phonological-syntactic information decay?

An experiment is reported that investigates the kinds of information people remember about sentences. During an acquisition phase, subjects processed sentences semantically in order to perform a rating task. Later, when tested for recognition, subjects false alarmed to novel sentences that shared semantic content with the acquisition sentences. They retained, however, significant amounts of detail about the surface form in which the semantic content was first encountered. The discrepancies between this experiment and earlier work is discussed in terms of different memory stores for different kinds of sentence information.