The effects of task on the representation of sentences

Abstract

Two experiments examine the extent to which the representation of a sentence depends upon the overall nature of a subject's task by probing this representation with single nouns. The probe nouns varied in their semantic and phonological relationship to the initial noun in the sentence. The results of the first experiment indicated that the tasks affected the semantic but not the phonological representation of the sentence. Together with the findings of a second experiment they suggest that when asked to memorize a sentence verbatim a subject retains the meanings of its words separately, whereas when he is asked to provide a continuation to the sentence he combines them into a unified representation.