WHY IS SHORT-TERM SENTENCE RECALL VERBATIM - AN EVALUATION OF THE ROLE OF LEXICAL PRIMING

By showing that short-term sentence recall can be significantly affect ed by words encountered in an intervening distracter task, Potter and Lombardi (1990, Journal of Memory and Language, 29, 633-654) argue tha t short-term sentence recall is often verbatim because of the availabi lity of recently activated lexical entries during the regeneration of the sentence from its conceptual representation. Pie show that similar effects can be obtained even when bilinguals pet-form an intervening task in a different language from that of sentence recall, or when mon olinguals perform an intervening task upon pictures. Furthermore, eve show that the presentation of a word in P&L's distracter task does not , in any case, affect subsequent retrieval of a semantically related w ord as measured in a picture-naming task. We suggest that the effects on recall reported here and by P&L should be explained in terms of con ceptual level interference at the time of recall. We also discuss the implications of our suggestion for the issue of the verbatimness of sh ort-term sentence recall.