Text Structure and Title-Effects on Comprehension and Recall.

A coherent text normally requires the reader to construct a sense of the total text. So we expected a thematic title to relieve the reader of most of this task. Experiment 1 confirmed this idea by showing that the thematic title significantly increased free recall if the text structure was regular or slightly disturbed, but did not affect recall of an unstructured text. Experiment 2 showed that prolonged reading time allowed the thematic title to raise free recall of a text with random structure. Furthermore, the two experiments demonstrated the comprehensibility ratings to be affected by the text structure and the reading time, but not by the title. Thus, comprehensibility ratings do not seem to be interchangeable with free recall.

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