The Structure and Recall of Narrative Prose

Abstract

This report describes a study of the recall of narrative prose. Subjects listened to repeated presentations of a tape recording of two pages from a history book, with verbal recalls collected after each presentation. The elements of the passage were organized according to a serial structure based on order in the passage and a story grammar structure based on casual relations. While the serial structure at first influenced which elements of the passage were remembered, as the subjects remembered more of the passage, the story grammar structure became the dominant influence over the elements remembered on subsequent recalls.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Oct 01, 1975
Accession Number
ADA017093

Entities

People

  • Donald R. Gentner

Organizations

  • University of California, San Diego

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Biomedical
  • Human Systems

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Acquisition
  • California
  • Cognitive Science
  • Education
  • Educational Psychology
  • Grammars
  • Human Resources
  • Information Processing
  • Management Personnel
  • Military Research
  • Naval Air Stations
  • Psychology
  • Security
  • Social Sciences
  • Training
  • United States
  • Universities

Readers

  • Brain and Cognitive Science; Experimental Psychology; Cognitive Neuroscience
  • Computational Linguistics
  • Structural Dynamics.