Three groups of 20 subjects received two exposures of a list of ten sentences followed by an immediate written recall test. The sentences varied in syntactic complexity from group to group, but the sentences for the three groups were similar in semantic content. The effect of sentence complexity upon recall performance was not found to be…

The influence of two aspects of language structure, syntax and associativity, on the free recall of verbal messages was investigated. (Syntax refers to the rules for ordering words within sentences; associativity refers to the network of meaningful relationships which exist among words in a language.) Twenty-four children from each of grades…

When two adults read eleven paragraphs, assigned a meaning to the target word in each paragrah, and answered questions about their strategies for dealing with the difficult/unknown words, they exhibited four strategies, outside of actual definition, that skilled readers use to deal with such words. The most often used strategy is paragraph…

Sixty-five grade 5-6 children were tested on a verbal recall task involving material of varying semantic and syntactic content. There was no difference between best and poorest readers in their performance on random lists of words, but there were clear differences on meaningful sentences and on syntactically well-formed but semantically anomalous…