Phonological information contributes to short-term recall of auditorily presented sentences

Potter and Lombardi (1990) suggested that verbatim short-term recall of sen tences solely depends on conceptual and lexical information. In two experim ents, we show that phonological information also contributes to short-term sentence recall. Modality of sentence presentation was varied, and a word l ist was presented before or after sentence presentation. It was assumed tha t phonological information contributes to the recall of auditorily presente d sentences but not to sentences presented under rapid serial visual presen tation. Therefore, better recall was expected for auditory than for visual sentence presentation. However, the advantage of auditory presentation shou ld only appear if the word list preceded the sentences and did not interfer e with phonological sentence information. Thus, word-list position should i nfluence recall after auditory but not after visual sentence presentation, as in the latter case the impact of phonological information should be grea tly reduced. The predictions were clearly confirmed. In addition, we replic ated Potter and Lombardi's (1990) conceptually motivated intrusion effect. (C) 2001 Academic Press.