Provides further evidence of the psychological importance of semantic roles for verbal learning and broadens the realm of earlier work with semantic roles by using connected prose rather than individual sentences. (HOD)

Two aspects of memory for prose were investigated. The amount of information remembered and the semantic interpretation assigned to ambiguous paragraphs. Task instructions and exposure duration of passages were varied. Recall and recognition measures indicated students remembered more with instructions requiring processing at a semantic level.…

Investigates a subject's internalized goals and the relationship of the goals to test performance as a function of different learning instructions. Stating specific goals was found to produce the most significant results among subjects. (Author/DEP)

In the present study, in which narrative passages were divided into linguistic subunits and these subunits measured for their structural importance, it was determined that the structural importance of the units was related to recall. (FWB)

Tests, with five groups, the production of facilitative transfer effects with the use of five abstract passages. It was predicted, based on assumptions about knowledge structures that three of the groups would recall more from the second passage than would the latter two groups. The results confirmed this prediction. (Author/DEP)

Recalls from five passages learned by undergraduates in the course of growing up in America were obtained. Recalls, while partial, were exact with no evidence of constructive memory. Results fit a simple model of associative chaining retrieval of passively stored surface structure units. (CHK)

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)

The results of the study show that illustrations combined with aural stimuli facilitate the learning of prose among six year old students when the choice of objects used in the illustration is not left to the child. (Author/DEP)

The effect of supplementary questions on learning from textual materials was investigated in a sample of 94 college juniors. Each subject was given a 1,500-word passage describing the concept of measurement. One treatment group was asked to identify characteristics of the concept; another was asked to identify examples from the text; a third…

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)

The superior retention of superordinate ideas over time was replicated in this study which demonstrated the construct validity of a recognition test based upon the structure of a prose passage. A link was made between existing data on memory for prose and past theory: Ausubel's subsumption theory and Craik and Lockhart's levels-of-processing…