Beyond sentence boundaries: Grammatical gender information in short-term recall of texts

Abstract

In the context of text recall it is often stated that surface representations are quickly forgotten. Jarvella (1971) and Sachs (1967) argued that what is retained beyond sentence boundaries is meaning information, whereas lexical and syntactic information is only available for the most recent constituent. We based a text recall experiment on Jarvella's paradigm, in order to demonstrate that both meaning and grammatical gender information contribute to the recall of short text passages. Although it is known that grammatical gender information is used in anaphor resolution, even if noun and pronoun do not belong to adjacent sentences, there is no direct evidence for a gender contribution to text memory so far. The present experiment demonstrates that grammatical gender information, even when of no semantic importance, is retained beyond sentence boundaries and can contribute to the memory representation of subsequent text. All materials and additional statistics may be downloaded from mc.psychonomic-journals.org/content/supplemental. © 2009 The Psychonomic Society, Inc.