Representation and retention of verbatim information

Two experiments are reported that study subjects' memory for active and passive sentences. A reaction time methodolgy is used to measure subjects' memory for verbatim information about the sentence. It is shown that retention of the verbatim information displays the traditional short-term versus long-term discontinuity. The verbatim information can be interfered with by interpolation of meaningless strings of similar words. This is taken as evidence that the encoding of the verbatim information is similar to the encoding for a meaningless string of words. The various data can be accounted for by the ACT model ( Anderson, Language, Memory, and thought. Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1976 ) which represents both kinds of information in a propositional network.

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