Syntactic processing of connected speech

Abstract

Spoken connected discourse was interrupted for testing immediate recall where the speech just presented contained an identical sequence of words in one of two syntactic configurations. The clause unit previous to the one interrupted either belonged to the immediate sentence, or was part of the previous sentence. The Ss listening to the speech either wrote down as much as they could remember from just before each test pause (Experiment I), or wrote only after the first word of the identical sequences given as prompts (Experiment II). Various verbatim measures of recall support only the immediate sentence and immediately heard clause as retrievable units in memory. A psycholinguistic model of listening incorporating these results is discussed.