More on the recall of nominalizations

Previous research suggests that complexity of underlying syntactic structure is the best predictor of ease of recall of certain nominalizations. Two experiments demonstrated that transitive verbs and inanimate nouns in isolation were more difficult to recall than intransitive verbs and animate nouns. Thus, explanations of recall differences based on node counting indices are questionable. It is suggested that lexical representations will account for the recall differences observed in single items. However, the relation between syntactic complexity and lexical representation is still unresolved.