Phonological information in immediate short-term sentence recall

Porter and Lombardi (1990) showed that words that are semantically similar to nouns of auditorily or visually presented sentences intrude into sentenc e recall if presented in an unrelated word list (given either before or aft er the sentence). The authors interpreted this finding in terms of the conc eptual regeneration hypothesis. This hypothesis states that sentence recall is based on conceptual information whereas the role of phonological inform ation is negligible. However, this general interpretation is questionable. In order to demonstrate the involvement of phonological information in sent ence recall, we used Potter and Lombardi's intrusion paradigm. Participants were either presented with auditory or visual material. With respect to vi sual presentations we used two conditions: a rapid presentation rate (rapid serial visual presentation, RSVP) and a slow presentation rate. Under all conditions the word list was presented before the sentence. The intrusion e ffect was only found for RSVP but not for the slow conditions. This finding provides evidence for the assumption that phonological information general ly plays an important role in short-term sentence recall.