Inhibition of verbal memory retrieval as a consequence of prior retrieval

On each trial of the experimental procedure for this study, the words, from, a sentence were presented, one at a time. in scrambled order, After this. a recognition probe was presented 11) the crucial condition. a noun occurred once early in the scrambled sentence and again as the List word ill the sentence. The test word was, another noun from the. sentence. The test noun was recognized less well in this :condition than when (1) the scrambled sentence was truncated before the repeated noun so that the test noun was presented immediately before the point at which the repeated noun would have occurred. (2) the repeated noun was replaced with an adverb. and (3) the repeated noun was replaced with a noun that had not Occurred previously the scrambled sentence. These results suggest that the test noun was inhibited in memory following the processing, of repeated noun. The inhibition evidently occurred a, a consequence of the retrieval of the earlier occurrence of the repeated noun. The same sort of inhibition may occur for nonantecedents following the processing of a repeated-noun anaphor. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science (USA).