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SEMANTIC AND SYNTACTIC DETERMINATES OF CONSTRUCTED MEMORY OF THEMATICALLY RELATED SPOKEN SENTENCES

In the Bransford and Franks paradigm, college Freshmen and Sophomores (N = 302) heard tape recorded sentences that were either positively stated or negatively stated (Syntactic Variable) and whose content was semantically compatible or semantically incompatible (semantic variable) with an overall idea set. On acquisition lists, sentences were of one, two, three, and four idea component length, but only one idea component length sentences appeared on recognition lists. Groups differed according to whether the sentences were old (i.e. appeared on both acquisition and recognition lists) or new (i.e. appeared only on recognition list). In Experiment I in which subjects were asked whether they had heard the exact sentence before, the subjects accurately recognized old positively stated, semantically compatible sentences, but they thought that old, negatively and positively stated, semantically incompatible sentences were new. Inversely, subjects incorrectly thought new positively stated semantically compatible sentences were old, but they accurately recognized the new positively and negatively stated, semantically incompatible sentences and the new negatively stated, semantically compatible sentences. In Experiment II, in which subjects were asked whether the sentence meant the same as one heard before, recognition scores closely resembled those observed in Experiment I, suggesting that the subjects were basing their recognition scores upon a meaning criteria in both experiments. The results indicate that subjects construct a semantic memory referent when hearing thematically related sentences, and that the recognition decision is a function of this semantic memory referent and not some artifactually learned size of sentence pools. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 43-02, Section: B, page: 0539. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1982.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:fsu.edu/oai:fsu.digital.flvc.org:fsu_74767
ContributorsBEAGLES, CHARLES A., Florida State University
Source SetsFlorida State University
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeText
Format101 p.
RightsOn campus use only.
RelationDissertation Abstracts International

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