Effects of verbal shadowing on the recognition of visually presented verbal and nonverbal information

Are there distinct verbal and non-verbal processing systems in the mind? This study seems to support a dual-processing hypothesis. Although the first experiment determined that verbal interference (shadowing) was detrimental to the subjects’ memory of words and high-similarity pictures, the second, designed to minimize the possibility that students would sort through pictures (as they apparently had in the first experiment) indicated that verbal interference did not decrease memory of high-similarity pictures. Subjects were graduate students and faculty members.