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The Course of Representation in Memory During the Comprehension of Paragraphs
Author(s) -
Hyodo Muneyoshi,
Ny JeanFrançois Le,
Achour L'Hacène
Publication year - 1994
Publication title -
international journal of psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.75
H-Index - 62
eISSN - 1464-066X
pISSN - 0020-7594
DOI - 10.1080/00207599408248174
Subject(s) - psychology , representation (politics) , priming (agriculture) , comprehension , proposition , cognitive psychology , word (group theory) , natural language processing , linguistics , artificial intelligence , computer science , philosophy , botany , germination , politics , political science , law , biology
The course of the representation built in memory from a text during comprehension of paragraphs was studied by a probe technique (immediate item recognition). Three experiments showed that response times, the main variable, gradually increase as a function of the lag between the probe (a word or an atomic proposition) and its target in the text. In Experiment 3 the same result was also found with a priming technique. The absence of any kick‐up over the course of time was confirmed by several additional analyses of individual data. The results were only weakly consistent with models assuming two distinct memory stores, in particular a specific “short‐term memory store,” but highly consistent with models involving semantic activation and subsequent gradual deactivation.