Verb imagery and noun phrase concreteness in the recognition and recall of sentences.

Examined the role of verb imagery and noun phrase concreteness in determining sentence imagery and memory in 2 experiments with a total of 111 male and 17 female university students. Semantic changes in sentences were recognized more often if the noun phrases were concrete rather than abstract. Free recall of sentences was affected similarly by phrase concreteness. Verb imagery, however, had no effect on either recognition or recall performance. Analysis of recall by type of word indicated that organization of recall centered upon the nouns. Implications of these results for the hypothesis of imaginal coding of concrete sentence meaning are discussed. (French summary) (15 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)