Transformational Complexity and Short Term Recall

Abstract

Sentences of different syntactic complexity, followed by a list of eight unrelated words were presented to subjects auditorily. Recall of the sentence and the succeeding words was required. An assessment of the difficulty of processing the types of sentence was made by varying measures. No relationship between performance and transformational complexity was obtained, but qualifiers were a clear source of difficulty under any syntactic condition. A model of encoding is proposed based on the obtained results.