Recall of prose as a function of the structural importance of the linguistic units.

Verbal passages were objectively divided into linguistic subunits partitioned according to acceptable pausal locations. The linguistic units were then objectively ordered according to their importance to the structure of the larger prose passage. In three separate experiments, various samples of learners attempted verbatim recall of a single prose passage immediately after reading it or after a retention interval ranging up to 63 days. The structural importance of the linguistic units was shown to be related to their recall.