This study investigated subjects' ability to combine and organize information from different sentences, as well as their ability to retain that information. Ninety-six college undergraduates were given three trials to learn the characteristics of ships from a text. Attributes of each ship were clustered together (name organization), or sentences…

College students studied text about an imaginary solar system. Two cuing systems were manipulated to induce a single or double set of cues consistent with one or two sets of text propositions, or no target propositions were specified. Cuing systems guided construction and implementation of prose-processing decision criteria. (Author/RD)

The orienting role of objectives was examined in relation to text organization--defined in terms of ideational prominence of elements. Ideational prominence, which was manipulated, did influence learning, but lost its effect when relevant objectives were provided. Both orienting factors were also found to be little influenced by a time constraint.…

A series of seven experiments provided information on the relationship between the learning of prose and the structural importance of the linguistic subunits. Five samples of prose, including narrative folktales and two samples of textual prose, were studied to determine whether the patterning of learning corresponded to the structural importance…