The effect of sentence context on the stability of phonemic and semantic memory dimensions

Abstract

Phonemic and semantic memory dimensions of words presented in sentence or non-sentence context are examined with an eye toward evaluating the relationship between multistage models of memory and sentence word encoding. The former implicitly assume that short-term memories contain phonemic information while long-term memories contain semantic information. Results from a modified probe recognition task, in which the sound or meaning of a word is the unit of recognition, show that semantic information dissipates far more rapidly than phonemic, except within a sentence context. This is inconsistent with a hypothesis of semantic dominance of long-term memory.