In understanding comprehension as the active processing of reading material, and in assuming that certain key content is stored in the memory, then mnemonic cues could be one important means of recalling this stored information. Since associative words apparently have high mnemonic cue value, they have been the subject of numerous investigations. The author's experiment varied associative level and measured retention by content words, sequences, total words in sequence, average length of sequence, and idea units. The results indicated that the low-associative passages, not the high-associative ones, had consistently higher retention. Since this conflicted with numerous studies by Rosenberg, attempts were made to account for them by examining other research studies related to (1) the effects of associative strengths in child verbal learning, (2) the role of associative connections in processing discourse, and (3) different retention measures and their relation to a two-component memory analysis of discourse processing. Although the principle of associative wording as the key to retention of connected discourse was generally supported, further research was recommended on associative density, size of the associative unit, and associative saliency. A bibliography is included. (DH)