Sentence Processing with Visual Presentation

Abstract

Two studies are reported investigating the role of articulation at input on the memory of visually presented sentences. The results of Experiment I indicated that irrelevant articulatory activity caused a decrement for the verbatim recall of both instructive sentences and word lists. However, there was no recall decrement for instructive sentences when the recall task consisted of carrying out the instructions given in the sentence. Experiment II indicated that irrelevant articulatory activity resulted in a decrement for sentence recognition with respect to both meaning and word changes. The results of the two experiments are discussed in terms of a differential need for the articulatory apparatus in the processing of "light" versus "heavy" information loads.