Examines the impact of listeners on speakers' later memory for events. Shows that attentive listeners facilitate long-term memory, whereas situations with distracted listeners are difficult to distinguish from situations with no listener and with no recounting at all. (SR)

Reviews prior research to stress the functionality of fluidity in making ready information to support comprehension. Explores the fading of ready information, demonstrating how quickly the accessibility of information mutually known to two reunited characters fades when the text engages other topics. Describes a series of phenomena that cohere…

Investigates whether children's representations of the linguistic description of a goal-directed event was similar to their representation of the same event observed visually. Finds that mode of presentation did not affect the recall of most important actions, but that verbal description led to recall characterized by greater cohesion than visual…

Investigates what young children remember and how consistent is their recall. Finds that young children recall more information when conversing with a stranger than with their mother. Shows that, although more consistent in conversations with the same adult across two interviews, children's recall is highly inconsistent. (SR)

Demonstrates that reactivation of unsatisfied goal information depended on the type of original goal context and whether it was fully reinstated and that reinstatement of goal information from the distant target episode was successful only when the context was fully reinstated. Supports models of comprehension that assume reactivation of relevant…

Tests two views of how relevant global information becomes readily available to readers. Demonstrates that backgrounded information became readily available if it shared features in common with the current contents of working memory. Shows that this occurred independently of whether the information was relevant or thematically related;…

Memory for discourse by older adults was examined by comparing their performance with that of younger subjects on a text recognition task. Results showed that the old were better at detecting lexical substitutions than subject-object reversals, suggesting that the old retain lexical items better than the relations between them. (FL)

Suggests that two components of natural discourse (pragmatic information and knowledge about discourse style) play a role in memory for the surface form of sentences in discourse. Shows that recognition memory increased as a function of information about the speaker's positive and negative attitudes and that substantial verbatim memory was…

Hypothesizes a resonance process in which concepts and propositions in the discourse resonate in response to related elements in the current sentence, initiating a process that makes available a subset of the information in the representation. Reviews research; presents explicit assumptions about the discourse representation; and describes results…

Describes conversational joint remembering in terms of three hierarchically related functions--framing and orientation, correspondence functions, and validation function. Highlights the importance of studying remembering as a social activity governed by the setting in which it occurs. (JD)

Suggests that a factor underlying the complex analysis of prose is amount of elaboration. Reports findings of two experiments supporting this idea. (FL)

Uses W. Kintsch's Construction Integration model as a framework to explore the effects of preexisting attitudes on memory for texts. Shows that preexisting attitudes interacted with attitude texts over delay although not in a direct or expected fashion. Emphasizes the need to manipulate representational levels of attitude texts and to consider…

Suggests that even the youngest children use systematic strategies in ordering the elements of a story based on causal and temporal relationships. (FL)

Finds that explicit anaphors only reactivated undergraduate students' target antecedents when they are both lexically and conceptually identical to a target antecedent; but as distance between an anaphor and its antecedent increased, even an explicit anaphor did not reactivate a target antecedent. Shows that distant antecedents were reactivated…

Describes a two-part research project examining conversation memory organization packets (MOPs) at both cognitive and behavioral levels. Explores the nature of the informal initial conversation MOP, and examines whether discourse structures correspond to cognitive structures. Finds evidence that scenes in the conversation MOP are topic-centered.…