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Abstract
A growing amount of research has given evidence which indicates that memory for surface structure characteristics of naturally produced verbal discourse can be quite substantial. This is not in agreement with the idea that it is only the conceptual meaning or gist of a verbal message that is stored. Research that has given evidence in favor of the latter contention has not used a naturally produced discourse. Instead, subjects have usually been instructed to read or listen to prepared material. In this study, people's recognition memory for utterances from dyadic conversations was studied. Three types of utterances were used, namely, utterances that were exactly as they had appeared in the conversation, paraphrased utterances, and new utterances. The results supported the possibility that memory for surface structure features is important and a normal characteristic of how one remembers naturally produced discourse. Moreover, comparisons with earlier findings that have shown that memory for one's own utterances is generally better than memory for the other party's utterances could not in general replicate these findings. This result is also ascribed to the fact that a natural conversational situation was used. The findings of this study suggest that the conception of conceptual meaning versus surface structure as used by many cognitive theorists is insufficient for characterizing how naturally produced verbal discourse is processed and stored.
Notes
I am grateful to Åke Gidlund for assistance in connection with data collection and to Per‐Håkan Ekberg for help with data computation. Requests for reprints should be sent to Erland Hjelmquist, Department of Psychology, University of Göteborg, Box 14158, S ‐ 400 20 Göteborg, Sweden.