Examines the rhythms of prose, cites several methods of determining language patterns, and concludes that the English language is basically a balanced language. (RB)

Describes a study of the recall of narrative prose. Serial structure at first influenced which elements were remembered, but as the Ss remembered more, the story grammar structure became the dominant influence over the elements remembered. (Author/RM)

Summarizes trends over the last century of analyzing literature (poetry and prose) through the aid of linguistic theory. The contributions and shortcomings of various schools (Structuralist, Danish, Formalist, Transformationalist, Generativist) to the evaluation of literature are briefly outlined. (LET)

High school juniors and seniors participated in three studies of the effects of a thematic organizer on passage comprehension. Comprehension was measured using a cloze procedure in the first study and using a passage-reproduction task in the second and third studies. A thematic organizer (material presented to provide a context for the passage)…

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

Report of an analysis of the prose of five British and five American authors which seems to refute Francis Christensen's contention that the cumulative sentence" is the typical sentence of modern English." (Author/RD)

A general theoretical framework for studying the representation of prose in memory is presented. The framework emphasizes the relational structure of story characters as determined by major story themes and provides for empirical consideration of author-reader communication. (SW)

Memory representations of statements from a story were predicted to cluster into separate episode chunks in memory. It was shown that the recall of episode depends on the length of that episode, but not on the lengths of other episodes. The chunking idea was confirmed. (SW)

A technique was devised for constructing a text story which subjects agreed matched the dialogueless movie "The Red Balloon" in episodic structure. It relies partly on subjects judging where episodes and their components were located in the stories. Differences in content in movie and text recall are discussed. (SW)

This paper explores the meanings and distribution of the perfect in contemporary American English prose, with reference to problems encountered in teaching English as a second language. The English perfect comprises forms traditionally called present perfect tense, past perfect tense, and perfects of the infinitive, gerund and present participle.…

Portions of a corpus of modern American prose were analyzed for the occurrence of "man" and its compounds. The passages analyzed were written in 1961, and showed no effects of recent movements to "desex" language. Occurrences were classified as generic mixed, generic masculine, and specified masculine. The mean of instances per…

The relationship between children's knowledge of particular situations and their comprehension of stories about them was investigated. Children in kindergarten and grades two, four, and six heard stories about differentially familiar situations and then answered questions. "Scripts," characterizing knowledge about stereotypical events, were…

Examines (in two experiments) the effects of schematic and proposition-specific processing on long term story memory. Determines that recall of idea units was an additive function of the idea's importance. Finds that both proposition-specific and schema-related processing are important for long-term retention of narrative prose. (SKC)

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…

A schema-based framework for representing knowledge and prose organization was studied. Testing of a script pointer and tag hypothesis confirmed that memory discrimination is better for atypical actions in a passage than for typical script actions and that there is no memory discrimination for very typical actions. (SW)