Conceptual complexity and imagery in comprehension and memory

Abstract

Two experiments tested the hypothesis that verbs are represented in memory as combinations of primitive actions and relations which encode their underlying conceptual structure. This hypothesis forms the basis of a theory of language understanding called Conceptual Dependency Theory ( Schank, 1972 ). In Experiment I, comprehension latencies and cued recall probabilities were obtained for sentences of varying conceptual complexity. Increasing the complexity of conceptual structures resulted in longer comprehension latencies and lower recall levels when the verb was part of the target for recall. These results supported the conceptual complexity hypothesis, but were confounded with imagery value of the verbs. In Experiment II, imagery value and conceptual complexity were manipulated orthogonally. The results rejected complexity in favor of imagery as the predictor of performance. Recall data from both experiments suggested that imagery had a discrete effect on memory for verbs only, and did not serve to integrate individual sentences into holistic units.