Memory for conversations

A growing amount of research has given evidence which indicates that memory for surface structure characteristics of naturally produced verbal discourse can be quite substantial. This is not in agreement with the idea that it is only the conceptual meaning or gist of a verbal message that is stored. Research that has given evidence in favor of the latter contention has not used a naturally produced discourse. Instead, subjects have usually been instructed to read or listen to prepared material. In this study, people's recognition memory for utterances from dyadic conversations was studied. Three types of utterances were used, namely, utterances that were exactly as they had appeared in the conversation, paraphrased utterances, and new utterances. The results supported the possibility that memory for surface structure features is important and a normal characteristic of how one remembers naturally produced discourse. Moreover, comparisons with earlier findings that have shown that memory for one's own utte...