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WRAP UP EFFECTS

المؤلف:  John Field

المصدر:  Psycholinguistics

الجزء والصفحة:  P328

2025-10-27

1181

WRAP UP EFFECTS

Effects which mark the point at which the reader or listener constructs a higher-level meaning representation and no longer retains the verbatim form (the actual words) of a clause or sentence.

The clause appears to be an important unit of processing in reading and listening (and indeed in speaking and writing, where whole clauses are held in a buffer ready for production). When listeners are presented with two consecutive sentences, their ability to recall the actual words they have heard begins to decline at the end of the first sentence. It seems that henceforth the actual words are no longer available in working memory. It may be that the effort of imposing a syntactic structure on the string of words is so demanding that WM can no longer hold on to verbatim text as well. Or it may simply be that the words are no longer needed and efficiency demands that they be dropped.

Similar ‘wrap up’ effects have been demonstrated in reading. When subjects have to press a space bar in order to bring up the words of a text on a computer screen, they slow down at clause and sentence boundaries. The more clauses a sentence contains, the greater the slowdown at syntactic boundaries– suggesting that it takes longer to integrate each new chunk as the mental representation becomes more and more complex.

Note that sentence wrap up effects do not demonstrate that processing is delayed until the end of the clause. Processing takes place on-line (as the stimulus is received). Wrap up effects occur when it becomes necessary to impose a pattern on what has been processed.

See also: Syntactic parsing, Verbatim recall

Further reading: Singer (1990: 41–7)