Eight experiments evaluated a core assumption of several theories of text processing, the shared resource assumption, which states that component text processes share limited processing resources. Short texts each contained two critical sentences that together warranted a causal inference. The syntactic structure of the second sentence was either…

The report presents an analysis of the underlying structure of simple stories and examines the implications of such structure for recall. Data comparing recall by children and adults suggest that story schemata differ somewhat at various points in development and that consequently there are qualitative differences in recall. (RC)

Two experiments study the effects of structure and content variables on memory and comprehension of prose passages. The first experiment tests the effects of systematically varying the amount of structure present in to-be-learned passages. The second experiment assesses the independent contributions of structure and content variables in…