Forty children listened to stories and then answered questions about temporally neutral and temporally tagged information. Observed interactions among age, additional processing, and kind of information demonstrated the importance of the distinction between these types of information for developmental studies of memory of prose. (Author/DB)

The patterning of recall of linguistic subunits was found to be strongly related to the semantic dimensions of abstractness-concreteness, specificity of denotation, comprehensibility, and interest. (Author/BJG)

Research supported in part by a Research Foundation of the State University of New York summer research fellowship to Marcia Johnson. (VM)

The effects of prepassage questions quizzing information of different structural importance on college students' memory for expository prose passages were compared. Results indicated that questions which direct the subjects' attention to material at the top of the organizational structure facilitate the effective encoding of the central…

Two experiments examining the effects of providing appropriate frameworks for comprehending ambiguous sections of prose were conducted with 143 children from second through seventh grade. (Author/JMB)

The first experiment made use of adjunct questions to manipulate the probability that kindergarten and second-grade children would make inferences during comprehension. The second investigated the relative influence of memory for details, memory for explicit information, and age on memory for inferences. (Author/RH)

The 13 chapters in this book are based on papers presented at the 1974 Indiana Cognitive/Mathematical Psychology Conference, at which contributors were asked to emphasize the relatively broad theoretical significance of their work, to incorporate the work of others, and to speculate about future developments. Topics covered include the nature and…

Several studies have reported adult age deficits in memory for prose materials. Adult age differences in prose comprehension were examined among young and old adults from high or low educational backgrounds. Subjects (N=53) listened to tape-recorded versions of two narrative passages and attempted to orally recall the stories. Subjects were…

This paper develops the thesis that the knowledge a person possesses has a potent influence on what he or she will learn and remember from exposure to discourse. After outlining some assumptions about the characteristics of the structures (schemata) in which existing knowledge is packaged, a theory of the processes involved in assimilating the…

Two experiments concerned with memory and comprehension of prose passages were conducted with children from second through seventh grade. In both experiments the major variable was the provision of appropriate frameworks for comprehending ambiguous sections of the passages. In the initial experiment, recognition of theme-congruent and…

This report presents a summary of the research designed to develop a psycholinguistics of comprehension and memory for meaningful written prose paragraphs. The approach departs from most previous ones by seeking to formulate an explicit theory, instead of relying on informal qualitative judgments as to paragraph structure, the scoring of data, and…