Story structure versus content in children's recall

Several previous investigations of story recall have consistently found that certain story constituents are better recalled than others, suggesting a universal, underlying representation for a story. The present study examined this possibility by controlling for the semantic content of settings, initiating events, internal responses, consequences, and reactions across versions of the same story. Using gist criteria, free and probed recall of these five categories was nearly equal, failing to replicate the previous findings. Using syntactic form and relative location criteria to measure recall accuracy, however, internal response and reaction categories underwent categorical transformations which replicated the prior pattern favoring settings, initiating events, and consequences in recall. The lack of differences in gist recall among the categories was attributed to the importance of story events in relationship to a goal—action—consequence hierarchy rather than to a story event's structural functioning. The fact that subjects transformed the syntactic form and relative location of certain categorial information during recall suggests use of story schema operations at retrieval.