On Units of Storage and Retrieval
Chizuko Izawa · Psychology Press eBooks · 2014
Theorists of memory must decide what kinds of units are to be entered into memory, used to probe memory, and recovered from memory. For example, should a word be stored as a set of associated letters, a lexical entry, a con cept, some combination of all of these, or something else? Should a paragraph be stored as letters, words, propositions, sentences, a single paragraph unit, some combination of these, or other things? In this chapter we are concerned specifically with sentences. Is a sentence best considered as a collection of interconnected units like words? Jones’ fragment model (1984) is of this form. Or is a sentence best considered as a single unit with words or sentence fragments as part of that unit’s structure, as in the model proposed by Kintsch (1974). In this chapter we begin an examination of this issue, and attempt to winnow some of the many alternatives.