Biomedical subjects

Ralf Rummer

Publications and source records attributed to Ralf Rummer.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2005

Evidence for a modality effect in sentence retention.

It is well known that an acoustic-sensory code supports retention of linguistic materials whose storage is particularly based on phonological information (e.g., unrelated word lists). The present study investigates whether such a code also contributes to the retention of sentences. It has been shown that short-term sentence recall particularly depends on propositional and lexicosemantic information, which are assumed to be supplied independently of modality influences. We employed the intrusion paradigm of Potter and Lombardi (1990) and manipulated the availability of acoustic-sensory information. Participants were instructed to read sentences either silently or aloud. Since these two reading conditions also differ with respect to articulatory information, a further condition that provided articulatory but not acoustic-sensory information was introduced (i.e., silent mouthing). Our data suggest that acoustic-sensory information is used, if available, even in sentence recall.

Humans↗

PubMed2004

Immediate and delayed recall of visually presented sentences: evidence for the involvement of phonological information.

The lure intrusion effect refers to the observation that lexical priming affects recall of sentences. This effect is taken as evidence against the contribution of surface information, even with immediate sentence recall. Recently, Rummer and Engelkamp (2003a) demonstrated that this effect, which is usually observed under rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP), does not appear under immediate recall of auditorily presented sentences. This finding indicates that surface information (i.e., phonological or acoustic-sensory information) can contribute to immediate sentence recall. So far, however, the findings do not allow for a decision on whether phonological and/or acoustic-sensory information is used in immediate sentence recall. In order to dissociate the two kinds of surface information, an experiment was conducted in which immediate and delayed recall were tested for sentences that were visually presented for a longer period of time than in RSVP. This kind of presentation should support phonological representations, but does not allow for acoustic-sensory representations. The findings showed a smaller intrusion effect for immediate than for delayed recall. This indicates that, if available, phonological information is involved in immediate sentence recall thereby reducing the lure intrusion effect. Furthermore, the findings support the assumption that the phonological trace provided via RSVP reading is weaker than in normal reading.

Humans↗

PubMed2003

Short-term sentence recall: evidence for the contribution of acoustic-sensory information.

To demonstrate that short-term sentence recall is based on conceptual and lexico-semantic information, Potter and Lombardi [J. Memory Lang. 29 (1990) 633] conducted a series of experiments using the intrusion paradigm, which combines short-term sentence recall and lexical priming. In the present paper, we employed the intrusion paradigm to demonstrate that acoustic-sensory information is involved in sentence regeneration as well. For this purpose, we presented sentences visually for silent reading (conceptual and phonological information) and reading aloud (conceptual, phonological, and--in addition--acoustic-sensory information). We demonstrated that less intrusions appeared in the reading aloud condition. This effect supports the assumption that, if available, acoustic-sensory information contributes to the regeneration process.

Acoustics↗

PubMed2003

Phonological information in immediate and delayed sentence recall.

Potter and Lombardi (1990) state in their conceptual regeneration hypothesis that immediate sentence recall is only based on conceptual and lexical information; phonological information does not contribute. As experimental evidence for this hypothesis, they reported that if a sentence is followed by a word list that included a lure word similar to one of the content words of the sentence (target word), the lure word frequently intrudes into sentence recall. We demonstrated that Potter and Lombardi did not observe any influence of phonological information because list presentation followed sentence presentation, and phonological information was discarded. We observed that phonological information influenced the intrusion rate if recall was not delayed by the subsequent presentation of a word list. With immediate recall, the lure intrusion effect disappeared in auditorily presented sentences. This shows that, if available, phonological information contributes to sentence recall.

Adult↗