Thematization and Sentence Retrieval.

The purpose of these studies was to test the hypothesis that thematization affects the probability that a probe word will produce meaning-preserving recall of a sentence that is part of a discourse. Sentences were constructed along the lines of subject-verb-object and were presented in three experiments: free recall of isolated sentences, prompted recall of isolated sentences, and prompted recall of sentences from paragraphs. The experiments were: (1) Free Recall, No Context; (2) Prompted Recall, No Context; and (3) Prompted Recall, Paragraph Context. University of Pittsburgh undergraduates served as subjects for all three experiments. The results indicated that the effectiveness of words from sentences as retrieval prompts for sentence meaning is dependent upon thematization. When a sentence was presented in isolation, without context, and when the imagery and concreteness of the subject-noun and object-noun were high and equal, there was no difference between the two nouns in prompt effectiveness. However, when the subject was the theme of the paragraph, the subject was a much better prompt than the object. When the object was the theme, subject and object were equal. (WR)