Vocalization and suppression effects in sentence memory

Considerable debate surrounds the question of whether phonemic or auditory processing is beneficial during reading. The present research tested the generality of two short-term memory phenomena, taken to indicate the presence of auditory processing, to the sentence memory case. Experiment I demonstrated that sentences were better remembered following auditory than visual presentation. Also, suppressing vocal activity by asking subjects to count while reading led to a decrement in the retention of sentence wording and meaning. Experiment II ruled out a general interference explanation of the visual suppression effect and Experiment III extended the finding to memory for thematically related sentence sets. The results were discussed in terms of the relationship between speech and comprehension processes for meaningful material.