VERBATIM RECALL

The ability to reproduce the exact words used in an utterance. Accurate verbatim recall is relatively short-lived, with auditory input decaying faster than visual. After a brief interval, subjects are able to report the propositional content of a sentence they have just heard or read, but find it difficult to reproduce its surface form. Presented with a paraphrase of the original, they may identify it as featuring the exact words which they encountered. They may also claim to recognise sentences containing inferences which they themselves have added and which were not present in the original utterance.

It thus appears that listeners and readers jettison surface form as soon as possible in favour of a more easily stored conceptual representation. Verbatim recall drops markedly at clause and sentence boundaries, suggesting that the process of packaging the signal into syntactic units takes place at these points. It may be that the actual words are no longer necessary once the syntactic unit has been constructed. Or it may be that syntactic processing places such heavy demands upon working memory that it has to abandon its verbatim record of the words.

There is evidence that the ability to recall exact wording is influenced by the nature of the message. Asked to identify utterances from an informal seminar 30 hours earlier, a group was quite accurate in recognising those which had a high interactional content in the form of humour, personal criticism etc.; but rarely correct when more transactional (i.e. neutral informative) information was involved. But note that this finding (like many others in this area) tests the ability to recognise utterances when they are repeated rather than the ability to recall the words unprompted.

Of course, there are many cases where individuals do indeed succeed in recalling long sequences of verbatim text: for example, actors learning lines or Muslim children studying the Koran. The important factor here seems to be that the task focuses attention specifically on verbatim content rather than on general meaning. Recall of the exact words of a passage is more accurate when subjects are advised in advance that they will have a memory test.

Some commentators claim that we do not have a memory store for verbatim language. They suggest that, when necessary, we reconstruct (regenerate) the wording of a message by identifying words in the lexicon which have been encountered recently and thus retain some residual level of activation. Our ability to do this comes to an end once the activation has finally decayed. Support for regeneration theory comes from evidence that a recently activated word is sometimes substituted for another that is close in meaning.

There is evidence that subjects recall function words less accurately than lexical ones. This may be because functors receive less attention during processing than lexical words or because they are stored and processed separately. On the other hand, the finding is also consistent with a regeneration account. Many functors occur very frequently.

Their activation is therefore less likely to be noticed. Or it may be that the difference between their activated and non-activated state is relatively small, due to their high probability of occurrence.

 See also: Rehearsal, Syntactic parsing, Wrap up effects

 Further reading: Potter and Lombardi (1990); Singer (1990: 41–7)

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المزيد

مواضيع ذات صلة

Primary and compound metaphors

Primary Metaphor Theory

Hiding and highlighting

The conceptual nature of metaphor

Invariance

Metaphors and image schemas

Metaphor systems

Metaphorical entailments

Motivation for target and source

The unidirectionality of metaphor

Conceptual Metaphor Theory

What is metaphor?