| Abstract: | S. D. Moesser (see PA, Vol 56:3437; 1977) found that Ss presented with a nonsequential order of interrelating sentences did not show any evidence of having integrated these sentences into composite units. This type of presentation procedure also produces an interference effect that lessens the probability of retrieving information from the presented sentences. However, J. Bransford and J. Franks (see record 1972-24191-001) reported that Ss presented with a nonsequential order of interrelating sentences automatically integrate the partial ideas into holistic units. Bransford and Franks based their conclusions on the facts that (1) Ss were unable to identify the exact exemplars that were presented, and (2) Ss showed a bias in choosing more complex sentences as having been part of the acquisition corpus. Two experiments are reported here, which were conducted with 124 Newfoundland college students who participated in 1 of 2 encoding conditions while performing forced-choice or confidence recognition tasks. Results show that both the failure to identify presented exemplars and the tendency to choose more complex sentences in the test corpus were products of the retrieval interference effect. Findings fail to support the proposal that Ss will automatically integrate related ideas into composite units. (French abstract) (21 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved) |
