The author examined relationships between message organization, message uncertainty, and verbal learning. Message organization was manipulated by varying the distance between repeated subject-verb-object triples in a sequence of sentences. Message uncertainty was defined as the uncertainty (variability) of word selections for subjects responding…

This research evaluated the total-time hypothesis for the learning of connected discourse--that in verbal learning "a fixed amount of time is necessary to learn a fixed amount of material regardless of the number of individual trials into which that time is divided." Learning material consisted of two sets of connected discourse for each of the…

Retroactive interference (RI) in prose learning was investigated in an experiment where passages were constructed on the basis of a predetermined logical structure. This structure made it possible to operationally define similarity and assess the effects of RI for inferential information as well as that stated directly in the original passage.…

This review, based on a survey of more than 1200 items in the research literature, begins by attempting to outline a theory of language comprehension and learning from language. A lengthy chapter is devoted to problems in the measurement of comprehension and of learning from connected discourse. Also considered, in successive chapters, are the…