Two experiments studied how people determine relationships among family members. In one experiment, subjects were to determine relationships in hypothetical families. In the second, the families were in the subjects' experience. It was determined that memory was organized in terms of parent-child relations together with knowledge of which members…

Five studies were carried out to analyze role of short-term storage in reading of organized text. By interrupting the subject's reading with a distractor task, information that was being carried in short-term storage was removed. It was found that this interruption effect could be countered by giving the subject the last one or two sentences that…

Three experiments were conducted to study the inferencing processes involved in anaphoric reference. Results show that an anaphora activates both its referent and concepts when in the same proposition as the referent, and that all three, when in the same proposition, are connected in the long-term representation of a text. (PJM)

In a modification of the sentence-picture comprehension task (Chase & Clark, 1972), 70 university undergraduates verified sentence-picture pairs. The findings limit the generalizability of any linguistic comparison model; two different comprehension strategies were used consistently by different subjects, whose choices of strategy were predictable…

Describes a question-answering procedure for probing the reader's internal representation of prose. Examines two dimensions of a reader's conceptual organization of plot: hierarchical level and relational density of propositions. (PMJ)

Reports three experiments investigating the relationship of the suffix effect and echoic memory. Shows that echoic memory persists for at least 20 seconds. Illustrates that echoic memory can be used to establish a more effective nonechoic memory. Shows that recency recall is higher to auditory than to visual items. (PMJ)

Reports three experiments to test age-related difFerences in sentence memory arising from sources other than noncognitive factors. Age-related differences are discussed in terms of deficiencies at encoding and retrieval. (PMJ)