Immediate Recall of Conversational Speech
Robert J. Jarvella · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1972
Spoken dialogue was systematically interrupted to prompt listeners' recall for one of the final two sentences which they had just heard. Besides change of speaker, three experimental conditions were defined, based on the more immediate speech. These were overt recurrence, implied but linguistically deleted recurrence, and lack of recurrence of critical phrases from the sentences to be recalled. Shared linguistic information in immediate memory by speakers and listeners as they talk is proposed to account for facilitation of recall in the implied recurrence condition. This information is coded to permit the deletion and recovery of linguistic segments in the production and perception of speech. Implications for regulation of the flow of information in conversational speech are noted.