The Prominence of Lexical Information in Memory Representations of Meaning.

Many current theories of memory assume that memory representations are abstract or conceptual in nature and that they exclude specific lexical information. It is argued that (a) the results of previous research in this area do not support the exclusion of lexical information from memory representations; and (b) an alternative word-based theory of memory provides more efficient representations and processes than the abstract theory. The results of three experiments conducted in the present study suggest that lexical information is present and persists in memory representations of meaning. Experiment 1 showed that, after a 10-minute filled interval, subjects reliably recognized studied sentences with greater confidence than synonymous distractors. Experiment 2 showed that subjects verified studied sentences faster than true synonymous sentences, again after a 10-minute filled interval. Experiment 3 showed that the presence of identical words in learned sentences caused interference in verifying the sentences, while the presence of synonymous words did not. These considerations suggest that the word-based theory of memory should be preferred over the available theoretical alternatives.

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