Immediate Memory and Discourse Processing1

Publisher Summary This chapter discusses people's immediate memory for ordinary English connected discourse. Within experimental psycholinguistics, there is now a modest yet seemingly coherent body of findings, which touch on and explore this general phenomenon. A major conclusion, which can be drawn, is that significant aspects of linguistic structure are mirrored in what can be accurately recalled. The organization being reflected in such data is most plausibly an outcome of natural processing on the discourse which has taken place. The immediate clause and sentence of discourse are being organized as speech-processing structures in immediate memory. The effects are found in a number of different recall settings and in a recognition memory task.