Spreading Activation Theories in Sentence Memory , Sentence Comprehension , and Speech Production

comprehension, and speech production-especially speech errors. The characterlstics of different kinds of spreading activation theories will also be discussed. Presented here is a review of spreading activation theories in the basic human memory system. According to Ratcliff. Hockley, & McKoon (1985), spreading activatien theories in human memory can be grouped into two main classes; models which represent concepts as nodes in a network representation, and models which represent concepts in a distributed featural system. In the network models for human long-term memory, activation is hypothesized to serve different functions. In a sentence verification task, activation is assumed to spread from two concepts in a knowledge structure. If the search by using